


The Art of (De)Construction

by perfectpro



Series: Paradise Valley [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Slow Burn, can be read independent of series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 04:51:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5150954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s blood under her fingernails, and she doesn’t remember using the knife that liberally, but there’s blood seeping through her jeans, and the moon glows bright and luminescent. Lydia's doing this for Allison, though, and that alone means it's worth it. The wind blows harder, knocking one of the candles over, and it falls onto her, spilling hot wax down her side all the while.</p><p>-</p><p>Or, the one where Allison dies and everything goes to shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of (De)Construction

**Author's Note:**

> This is a part of a Paradise Valley universe, and my personal choice is to read [You Were Never Meant to Feel Alone](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4825298) (part 1 of the series) first, even though this fic occurs previously if you ascribe to a linear view of time. This fic can be read first (and does not contain spoilers for other portions of the series) without being confusing, but I recommend reading part 1 first.

The first night, lying in bed and trying to keep her heartbeat under control, Lydia’s thoughts slow into a steady stream of _Allison’s dead, Allison’s dead_ before she loses herself to sleep. She dreams of werewolves in the wilderness, of a wild will that can’t be contained, of a force of nature won’t be stopped, of a demon a thousand years old who possesses her friends and kills ruthlessly.

It’s not a dream, hasn’t been a dream since she found out the truth in sophomore year.

She wakes up twice, once just past midnight, and once close to four in the morning. Both times, it’s because the distant echo of a wolf’s howl has reached her ears, the sound of a shattered heart loud enough to rouse her. She leaves tracks of tears on her pillowcase, and her throat is still sore from the scream.

When seven in the morning rolls around and her alarm clock goes off, Lydia stares at herself in the mirror with dead eyes before she pulls her shoulders back. She’s Lydia Martin, and she’s survived a strangulation attempt, her ex-boyfriend’s transition from murderous lizard to werewolf, and a pack of alphas going after her friends. She’s Lydia Martin, and she’ll survive this, too. Even if she does want to crawl into bed and bury herself beneath the blankets, because that sounds a thousand times easier than facing this day as though it’s no different from the last.

Her head is spinning when she gets in her car, though, and it’s probably not the best idea for her to drive. She calls Scott instead, woozy with nausea as his phone rings.

“Lydia,” Scott answers after the third ring, and he sounds like he had an even worse night than she did.

She remembers the wolf howling in the distance, and realizes that he probably did.

“Can you pick me up for school? I can’t drive,” she confesses, and she has a headache or a tiny bomb implanted in her brain, but either way she can’t resist leaning against the headrest and wincing at the give in the material. It doesn’t feel right, it feels like everything should be unforgiving because that’s the way of the world, because anything else is unthinkable.

Everything should be unforgiving because her best friend is dead and staring at the top of a metal box in the morgue right now, waiting to be put into the ground. Lydia shivers in the morning air as she remembers that the morgue has to be kept cold to slow the decomposition process.

Allison always hated the cold.

Back in reality, she tunes in to Scott repeating her name gently. “Lydia, can you hear me? Lydia?”

“What?” she asks, blinking and shoving her thoughts away. They won’t do her any good now.

From the other end of the line, he sighs and says in a voice that clues her in to the fact that he’s probably repeating himself, “It’s Saturday. We don’t have school.”

Saturday. She tries to focus, tries to remember what day yesterday was, but all that keeps coming up in her mind is the fact that yesterday is the day that Allison died. Yesterday is the day that she sank to her knees, only a small portion of her scream stemming from her status as a wailing woman. Yesterday must have been Friday, but that can’t be right, Friday seems so normal and carefree, she and Allison spend Fridays getting ready for parties.

Spent, not spend. Not anymore. Spent their Fridays getting ready for parties, because now Lydia will spend her Fridays getting ready on her own and Allison will spend hers six feet underground. Even as her brain changes the tense, she cringes, wishing that she didn’t have to, because that’s too permanent and it hasn’t even been a day.

She wants Allison to look at her from the passenger’s seat and make a silly music request, put on a song from the early 2000s that both of them pretend to not know in public, but in her car they sing all the words together. The CD that’s in now is a mix CD labeled ‘Backstreet Boys Beats’ because Allison has always been a sucker for alliteration and boy bands. Now Lydia will be singing alone.

“Lydia?” Scott asks once more, concern showing through. She really needs to do better at paying attention, because he’s worried. And he clearly has reason to be.

“Saturday,” Lydia responds, one hands coming up to touch lightly at her temple, where the headache is stemming from. And then, almost as if to reassure herself, she repeats it. “Saturday.” Because it doesn’t feel like a Saturday, not when she’s used to going on trips to the mall after waking up from a sleepover at Allison’s.

His breathing evens out, because apparently the fact that she has enough mental facilities online to repeat a word that he’d initially said is promising. “Yeah, Saturday. Are you…” He drifts off, letting the words trail away and go unspoken, because she’s obviously very not okay, and he isn’t either, and they’re not going to get there any time soon. Five stages of grief, and denial doesn’t feel as painless as it promised to be.

Suppressing a sob that comes out of nowhere, she makes a strangled sound around the lump in her throat and manages to say, “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.” She felt the scream, had known who the scream was for, why hadn’t she done something sooner? She thought she could stop the Nogitsune, could save everyone, and instead she’d only fallen into his trap. Why hadn’t she at least found the time to say goodbye?

From the speaker of her phone comes a sound that’s abruptly cut off, as though Scott can’t dare to burden her with his grief. She wants to tell him that it’s alright, that she loved Allison as much as he did, but a vindictive part of her keeps quiet, says that she has enough to handle on her own already.

Another aborted, unidentifiable sound passes before Scott gets a hold of himself and tells her, “She knew.” Because it’s what he’s been telling himself, that she knew, she knew, she loved him and she knew.

Lydia gives a strangled sob of her own before taking three deep, calming breaths. She thinks about sunrises and flowers and not how Allison would meet her eyes before they silently judged someone. _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three_. After repeating that, she opens her eyes and stares blankly out her windshield. “Saturday,” she says, sounding stronger, more grounded. Less likely to fall apart.

“Saturday,” Scott informs her, voice still shaky. A part of her wonders if he got any sleep at all last night, or if he spent it running around and trying to get out of his own skin. If she had lycanthropic tendencies, it’s what she would have done instead of uselessly tossing and turning the night away, almost afraid to shut her eyes.

Her mind, briefly, wonders if Stiles slept last night, and then she thinks of the Nogitsune wearing his face and a grin that made her skin crawl, and Allison’s lifeless body comes to mind. The control she’d just had, however little over it there was, flees her instantly, because nothing is making this easier. Nothing is ever going to make this easier, not when she’s seventeen and dealing with her best friend’s death at the hands of something supernatural.

Scott’s struggling as much as she is, but the same vindictive voice in her that didn’t want to cry on the phone with him prevents her from saying anything. She doesn’t want to deal with this on her own, but she certainly doesn’t want to deal with it with anyone else.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she nods and chokes when she tries to speak. Nothing sounds right, not when there’s so much to be said and every word takes more energy than she has. “Thank you,” she finally whispers, and that’s not right either, but it’s closer than anything else she’s likely to find. It’s closer than _I’m sorry_ and it’s closer than _I miss her_ and it’s a hell of a lot closer than _this is fucked up_ , but she thinks the last one would taste better.

Her throat is dry, though, and saying anything else makes her feel dizzy. She’ll leave it there, because Scott has been best friends with Stiles for the last ten years, so he has an active enough imagination to finish her thought.

“No, Lydia, thank you,” he tells her in return, and when she hangs up she takes a moment to climb out of her car and shut the door behind her before vomiting in the rose bushes. In the ugly ones, the ones her mom hates but hasn’t had time to uproot, because she’s a considerate daughter like that. Allison had been a considerate daughter, too, and it’s with that thought that Lydia vomits once more, wipes her mouth, and cries.

-x-

Monday morning comes, and Lydia doesn’t even try to use concealer on the bags under her eyes. She does call Scott and ask him for a ride, but when he shows up on his bike she’s so overcome with memories of Allison smiling and waving to her from the back seat that she just shoves her keys at him and gives him a pleading look.

Stiles isn’t in school but he’s probably worse off than either of them are, considering that he’s recovering from demonic possession. It’s not enough to get him an excused absence, though, so she tries to take extra neat notes in the classes that she shares with him. When she’s feeling well enough to drive, when her head doesn’t swim as soon as she’s behind the wheel, she’ll take him the work he’s been missing out on. And she’ll try to not remember how the fox spirit moved in his skin, unnatural and cruel, silky and controlling in the most effortless of ways.

Her skin crawls with memories, and AP Chemistry isn’t challenging enough to distract her, so she does her calculus homework for something to do. It’s rudimentary at best, but it keeps her mind busy to the point where she isn’t worrying about how Allison is probably freezing in the morgue, she hopes they’ve at least dressed her warmly, maybe in that black knit scarf she always kept in her purse for emergency hickey situations.

“Um,” a girl’s voice says gently at her elbow, and Lydia turns to find Kira standing next to her. “The bell rang, the day’s over,” she tells her, but Lydia can’t remember hearing the bell, can’t remember the last half of class.

The last time she lost time like this was when Peter Hale was using her mind as his own personal playground, and she’s not letting that happen again. There will be no midnight strolls sans clothing in her future, thank you very much, once in a lifetime happened to be plenty. At least she’s not hallucinating, or, she doesn’t think she is. She glances over to the cover of her textbook, making sure the letters make sense just to be sure.

“Thanks,” she says, unintentionally chilly. She wants to like Kira, and she did like Kira before, but now she’s not just looking at her friend, she’s looking at the girl who’s going to take her best friend’s place. That vindictive voice in her thinks _Allison would have laughed at her replacement, she would have taken back her spot at Scott’s arm as soon as she felt enough time had passed_. That’s cruel, though, and her head is pounding, so she keeps quiet.

Kira nods, glancing back at her only once before leaving the room, probably headed out to go find Scott and solidify her place in the ranks as girlfriend. The ex may be dead, but that just means Allison has suddenly become an even bigger threat, as she’s now both perfect and unobtainable, everything that a guy could ever want. 

Pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes until she sees stars, Lydia feels the need to pull the bitchy voice out of her and scream that it’s not the time or the place, and that she has better things to do than try to keep a filter going for the deep, dark thoughts that shouldn’t be there in the first place. And maybe it’s a coping mechanism, maybe it’s from not getting enough sleep or the crying jags she’s now prone to, but either way it sucks. 

Scott is waiting for her by her car when she finally shows up, and when she checks her phone she winces at the number of missed calls she has from him. Seven missed calls, starting from an hour and a half ago. Not like she’d been doing much of anything, just sitting in the chemistry classroom and staring off into space, wondering if Christmas break will be helpful. It will be better than the summer, because she doesn’t know if summer is going to make things better or worse since she’ll undoubtedly be spending it alone.

Allison loved summer, loved the heat on her skin, and last year they’d spent it by the pool. This year, they’d been planning to do a road trip around southern California beaches, but Lydia guesses that she can probably cancel those hotel reservations now before she loses the deposit. It’s not like they’ll be needing them. 

“Has it been a hard day?” Scott asks, drawing her out of whatever reverie she’d been caught up in this time. He seems sympathetic, probably because he’s been spending most of his time thinking about her as well. They must be different memories that keep him preoccupied, but they’re probably every bit as important as the ones that keep springing up in her mind and taking her away from reality.

Her backpack weighs a thousand pounds, and suddenly the cushioned seats in her car look more comfortable than any bed ever could. “It’s been a hard year,” she says, the truth of it hitting her suddenly.

She’s seventeen years old with a dead best friend and a tendency to scream for the dead. When Lydia planned out her high school experience, she’d added extra time in case she got distracted from her usual goals, time for trips to the beach and to the lake house, time for spending weekends in Las Angeles and San Francisco. What she hadn’t thought to account for, though, was an introduction into the supernatural world and a mind-consuming grief.

Throw in the MIT open course software program she's taking part in, as well as preparation for college applications, and, yeah, it's been a hard year.

Is there a problem set due tonight online for the MIT chem course? She tries to remember, wonders if she might have written it down in her agenda, maybe she’ll have to eat dinner in front of her laptop while she works through the problems. Her mother won’t like it, but she’ll have to get over it, because she’d planned to start on Thursday and then she’d spent the night instead on the phone with Allison, going over the Isaac/Scott debacle, the eternal rom-com dilemma of classic true love versus bad boy with the face of angel.

As much as she likes Scott, Lydia had been all for Isaac, informing her best friend that she’d hunt him down herself if Allison didn’t get there first. Plus, the Scott option was further complicated when one considered the element that Kira added to the equation, so it had made the choice even easier.

“Let’s just go home,” Scott says, digging her keys out of his pocket.

Exhaling, Lydia tries to focus in on Scott. They’re in the parking lot, standing in front of her car, and everyone else has left. She feels dizzy, and Scott is looking at her like she’s about to fall down and hurt herself. “I’m fine,” she lies, unnecessarily gripping her purse strap for support. And then, because the repetition seems to help her get a handle on her mental state, she grits her teeth and forces the words out again. “I’m fine.”

He doesn’t look like he believes her, but that’s okay because she doesn’t even believe herself. The lie is needed, though, makes her feel slightly more in control. If she tells people she’s fine, she will be fine. That’s how it works.

Scott drives carefully, five miles under the posted speed limit and obeying all traffic laws on the way, using the turn signal religiously and letting other cars merge in front of him. He doesn’t touch the radio, concentrating on the stretch of road in front of him. Even so, he misses the turn for her house three times, and when he does finally make it to her street he drives past her house and has to go back so that he can pull into her driveway.

Sitting in the car and staring at her empty house, Lydia tries to figure out what time her mom will be home. With papers to grade, teachers to gossip with, and curriculum to plan, she doesn’t expect her home before seven. That’s at least three hours alone, and for a moment all she can see is sitting at the empty dining room table while the grandfather clock records the time gone by. Her head still hurts, hasn’t stopped hurting since she first noticed it on Saturday, still feels like a tiny bomb just waiting for the right time to go off.

She can’t go home. School was hard, but it was good. It at least took her mind off things, even if she did end up losing a bit of time. No hallucinations, though, so she’s willing to chalk it up as a win. Going home seems like one step forward, two steps back, because as soon as she walks through those doors she’ll just feel tired to the bone.

Next to her, Scott sits in silence, and then he starts the car up again. “I have to go see Deaton, you should come with me.” He doesn’t justify it, just backs out of her driveway and gets them back on the road after she’s nodded in agreement. “God, I keep thinking about it,” he says suddenly, voice choked, and she knows, automatically, exactly what he means. 

Allison’s body with a sword plunged through the center as her face contorted in surprise, Allison’s hand dropping on the ground as she gives up her last breath, Allison proclaiming her love for him one last time. Scott told her everything that night, and Lydia had sat as the images had consumed her mind. She keeps thinking about it, too, playing it over in different lighting as his words echo. Not only that, she keeps thinking about how she could have stopped it, how Allison coming to save her meant that she met her own untimely death.

Turning, she rests a hand on his arm and opens her mouth, but no words come out. Because there aren’t any words for it, and she knows that. And if there are words, it’s going to be a while before she’s able to find them.

Scott seems to know what she means, though, nods tightly and swallows as he looks at the road through glassy eyes. He gets them to Deaton’s without incident, making all the right turns even as he tries to get his newfound tears under control. And when he parks the car at the veterinary office, it’s only with one shuddering breath that he pushes the leftover emotion down before turning to her with a shaky smile.

“Come on,” she encourages him, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear as she opens the passenger’s door. Maybe while she’s here she can borrow a few of Deaton’s books, try to find something that might help Stiles.

It’s with that piece of encouragement that he follows behind her, walking into the vet’s office at her heels. Deaton is sitting in one of the rooms he sees patients in, but he’s not busy at the moment, and he ushers them back immediately, his face grave in light of the tragedy they’ve all been faced with. 

He talks with Scott in a hushed voice, looking at the boy with a pity that makes Lydia’s veins catch fire, because she’s suddenly aware that it’s the same way people have been looking at her since she got to school that morning. They don’t talk for all that long, just a few minutes before Scott is nodding, his eyes faraway as Deaton finishes instructing him on something that Lydia didn’t catch earlier.

“We’re going to help him,” Scott says in finality, knuckles white as his hands clench at his sides.

Help him? Help who? Lydia thinks it over before wondering why she didn’t realize it in the first place, of course Scott came here to figure out how to help Stiles. She relaxes her shoulders, moves slightly away from the wall, and asks if he has any books that might be of service, and whether or not she can borrow them.

When they leave an hour later, her backpack is laden down with the usual textbooks in addition to the three great tomes that Deaton had carefully picked out for her. She has instructions to come back next week.

-x-

The books aren’t that helpful, but that’s because most people die after possession. After sharing their body with something, they lose so much power that, even when the parasite has finally relinquished control, the host is no longer strong enough to run the show. So there’s not a lot of information to work with in the first place, but she makes do with what she has, throwing herself into research in the same capacity that Stiles himself would: she loses herself for hours in the books, resurfaces with bags under her eyes and a mind full of knowledge.

It helps, having something to dedicate herself to. Allison would be proud of her, how she’s forcing herself to move on to help her friend. Not move on, that’s not right, but English has never been Lydia’s strongest subject anyway.

Her favorite part of the books is that sometimes the spells come with equations, and then everything makes sense. Everything is math, and while it’s something she’s been sure of since she first understood algebra in third grade, it’s comforting to know that even magic is based in mathematics. She works the equations until they make sense to her, until she knows them so well that she could do them in her sleep.

Not that she’s been getting a lot of sleep lately, what with having nightmares about Allison trapped in the Hale house as it burns. And if it’s not Allison, it’s Stiles, and he’s swimming and keeps crying out for her, yelling that he can’t swim. When she tries to go to him, tries to jump in and move him back to shore, the water burns her.

Sometimes, when she manages to swim out to him, he turns to face her and it’s the Nogitsune using him as a mask, and it turns to her and says in a sickening voice, “ _I’m so glad that you_ care _, Lydia, he always had such a soft spot for you_.” Because it was all an act to get to her, he stops struggling in the water and pushes her under. She drowns with Stiles’s face staring coolly down at her while she gasps for air and draws in water instead of breath.

Maybe it’s for the best really, because the less time she spends sleeping the more time she has to do research, reading Deaton’s books as though they’ll be able to save her. As though they’ll be able to save her friend.

The useful information, while scarce, is often about new life, about continuing anew and pushing the presence further into the past. It says that human contact is helpful, that the host, when left alone immediately after the parasite’s abandonment, can lose control easier. That’s what makes her mind up, what has her packing her bag and getting in her car before she remembers she hasn’t driven since Allison died.

Nervously, she takes a few calming breaths before putting her keys in the ignition. She can call Scott, but she doesn’t want to. This is something that she has to do on her own.

That’s how she ends up at the Stilinski house, heart pounding as she raps at the door. She brought Stiles’s school work with her, because even if it’s only been three days it’s starting to pile up. And yeah, it’s the end of the semester, so him not doing it wouldn’t be the end of the world, but he’s the only one in the entire school who’s bothering to challenge her for valedictorian and she’s not going to let him give that up without a fight.

The Sheriff answers the door, and he doesn’t look surprised to see her, smiling and moving aside for her to enter. “Lydia, come in, you just missed Scott.” He looks worn, but overall he looks like the man she remembers, who handles Stiles’s antics with an eye roll and a shove in the right direction, who eats whatever health food is set in front of him reluctantly, and who, mostly, just cares about them. She feels a sudden surge of affection for the man.

“I came by to see Stiles, and to give him some course work. If he’s up for it, of course,” she says, trying for a smile as she realizes it’s very possible that Stiles might not be up for it.

The boy only just was released by a thousand year old spirit, he’s probably not back to feeling like himself yet.

The Sheriff nods and glances at the stairway that leads to Stiles’s room. “Today has been a pretty good day, all things considered. I’m sure that seeing you will help, though. I’ll take you up,” he tells her, closing the front door before turning and escorting her up the stairs and down the hall. He knocks lightly at the door, even though it’s open and calls, “Stiles, you’ve got a visitor.”

The door swings open a little more, enough for Lydia to see Stiles lying down on his bed, his hands pressed over his eyes before turning his head to see her.

Suddenly, she’s ashamed that it took her so long to come. It’s been five days since she’s seen him, and he looks like he’s aged a year. The circles under his eyes that the Nogitsune put there have stayed behind despite the spirit’s absence, the symptom outlasting the sickness. There are other clues, too, how he’s pale and thin, gaunt and tired.

He cracks a smile, and Lydia sighs, letting out a breath she hadn’t remembered holding. He’s Stiles, he’s her Stiles, back the way he’s always been, and he’s in control. Not some spirit that appears in her dreams, holding her down with unyielding arms while staring at her with eyes dark as night. She’s never going to let anything happen to him, not that she’s got him back and her best friend is slowly rotting in a metal drawer.

“Hey, Lydia,” he breathes, and it sounds like he’s almost not used to talking. His voice is scratchy, as though it hasn’t been used recently. She thinks back to what the Sheriff said, how today has been a good day. This is Stiles on a good day, and she should be thankful.

“I’ll leave you to it,” the Sheriff says, nodding slowly at his son before leaving standing at the door alone.

Walking into Stiles’s room, she avoids looking at the bulletin board with the strings, because there are too many things they’ve had to face that they’re too young for. “I brought you your school work,” she says, digging a thick folder out of her backpack and holding it out like it’s the real purpose that she came. In some way, it is why she came, but she knows that she’s here to make sure that he’s okay, and she thinks that Stiles at least suspects that her main motivation for not just giving the schoolwork to Scott and having him play delivery boy.

He gives her a small smile, groaning as he rolls his eyes and looks away. “Scott brings me video games and gossip, and all you have to offer is schoolwork? Weak, Miss Martin. It’s like you’re not even trying, here,” he taunts her, moving a hand to pat the space next to him like an invitation.

This territory is more comfortable to her than walking on eggshells is, so she leaves the folder on his desk and sits next to him, leaning back against the headboard and looking down at him with a smirk. “Scott gives you gossip? Please, like Scott would know gossip if it bit him in the ass. I’ll keep you updated, though, don’t worry. When you come back to school, it’ll be like you never left.”

She goes on to tell him about all of the things happening with the cheerleaders, how one of the lacrosse guys on varsity got caught cheating on his girlfriend in Finstock’s office so he’s off the team until the next year. Some of things she tells him are secondhand, but she trusts her sources because Danny knows not to keep quiet about how their classmates are making fools of themselves this time. It starts stilted, but she gets more comfortable as time goes on, and even though Stiles doesn’t say much she feels him relax next to her and that’s just as good.

When she falls quiet, he confesses that he doesn’t always know if he’s dreaming, that he has hallucinations and dissociates frequently enough that he’s uncomfortable being around large groups of people for long. He mentions that it helps when Scott or his father is with him, and Lydia is enraged with herself for not coming sooner.

Stiles seems to know what she’s thinking, because he slips his hand into hers and says quietly, “It’s okay. I’m getting better.” Because he is, he feels more like himself and less like an empty shell with every day.

Tangling their fingers together, she nods and tries to keep from crying. She’s cried enough, and she doesn’t need to waste her time with that anymore. It won’t help, won’t change anything, and it will just end with her feeling even more useless than she already does. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and she can’t figure out what for, but it feels necessary. She needed to say it, and Stiles needed to hear it, and maybe now things can get better.

He squeezes her hand, looking up at her like a question that she doesn’t know how to answer, and then he whispers, “Will you go with me to Allison’s funeral?”

-x-

By the time Saturday rolls around, Lydia wants to call Stiles and tell him that she can’t go, she can’t be there, she can’t be anywhere near the graveyard where her best friend is going to be laid to rest. She hasn’t been sleeping any better, and, even after seeing Stiles, the dreams are getting worse. Allison isn’t trapped in the burning Hale house, anymore, no, she’s found more interesting ways to die. She dies with Peter Hale clawing her throat out, she dies with a kamina tearing her in half, she dies at the hands of the Alpha pack.

She always dies screaming.

On Friday night, Lydia closes her eyes for a moment and Allison dies as the Nogitsune, using Stiles as a costume, twists a knife into her heart with a smile. Lydia grasps at her bedsheets and flings herself at the window, throwing it open to get a breath of fresh air and stop the nausea that’s thrown itself onto her.

Her mom helps her get dressed, picks out a black dress that Lydia can’t remember being in her closet and pairs it with a nondescript pair of flats. She even sets out a thin pearl necklace and matching earrings, and as she moves to clasp the necklace around her daughter’s neck, Lydia is hyperventilating, holding one hand out to ward her off.

“I keep,” she gasps, her other hand clutching at her throat as she breathes unevenly, “I keep remembering,” she continues, tears pricking at her eyes while she tries to get herself under control. 

Natalie stills for a mere moment before setting the necklace aside and sitting on the bed next to her. She and Lydia haven’t talked about the strangulation since it happened, since her daughter proved her strength by walking through the doors of her high school with a ring around her neck. “It looks better without the necklace. More classic,” she says, taking Lydia’s hand gently and threading their fingers together.

They sit like that for a few more minutes, until Lydia’s breathing evens out and her phone buzzes with a text from Scott. He’s coming with her and Stiles in her car, because Stiles confessed he’s worried about dissociating while behind the wheel and because Lydia thought that Scott probably wouldn’t be able to see straight after the service.

She’s the most stable out of all of them at the moment, and that’s a little scarier than it should be considering she just had a small break down and the service isn’t for another two hours. It’s okay, though, it has to be okay, and she’s going to be okay because there’s not another option at this point.

Breaking away from her mother, Lydia reads Scott’s message and sighs, informing him that she’ll come over early to help him with his tie since his mom is working a double shift. Why she knows how to tie a tie and she’s never had to wear one when her male friends apparently have never mastered the skill, she’ll never know, but she’s become the go to girl for Scott and Stiles for all formal occasions that merit it.

Her mother offers to drive them, but Lydia denies, not wanting someone to intrude on their grief.

-x-

Scott sits with Chris Argent at the front of the service even though there are Argents filling the pews because apparently Allison’s death calls for a ceasefire in the feud between hunters and werewolves, and Lydia sits next to Stiles the middle of a pew with the rest of the pack and prays that neither of them start screaming. Stiles looks shaky at best, and he keeps fidgeting. She doesn’t exactly know what her own emotions are doing, because mostly she’s been concentrating on keeping calm, taking deep breaths. _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three_. She doesn’t listen to the priest, because Allison wasn’t particularly religious and would probably take offense at her estranged, French, Catholic grandmother getting that much of a say in her funeral.

Chris speaks, eyes on the audience instead of the casket directly in front of him. Lydia can barely hear him over Kira’s sobs coming directly to her left, and that bitchy part of her pops up again, says _she barely even knew Allison, shut up, shut up already_. Lydia tells her bitchy persona to shut up in turn, and it surprisingly does as she puts the hand that isn’t holding Stiles’s on the other girl’s back, rubbing small, soothing circles into the skin.

By the time Kira’s calmed down, Chris is finishing up his speech. He isn’t crying, isn’t letting himself. Not in front of all of these people. Allison would have been stronger than that, and he needs to be stronger than that. _There’s a reason the Argent women are the leaders._ Back straight, he finally looks at the coffin and says in a tone that’s positively haunted, there’s no other word for it, “I love you. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of us.”

Then he’s stepping down and Scott is stepping up, holding a crumpled piece of paper in a shaking hand. His eyes are shiny, but his voice doesn’t crack as he praises Allison’s passion for her friends, her desire for justice, and her heart of gold. He says that Allison took care of herself, but she took care of her friends first and foremost, and she didn’t let anything come between her and her goals. It’s all true, every single word of it, and Lydia is relieved that Scott isn’t changing who Allison was for these people. When he says that she could single-mindedly do anything once she thought of it, she thinks of Allison threading the needle with steady hands and a shaking heart. 

“She never worried about what other people thought of her. And she could be callous, and cruel at times, but those were the parts of her that she didn’t like very much. I liked those parts of her, though, I liked that they made her who she was, and I loved every piece of her,” Scott finishes, swallowing the lump in his throat.

There isn’t a dry eye in the entire sanctuary, Scott included, when he walks in front of the casket and places his hand at the center, head bowed as he whispers to Allison’s corpse what he should have had the chance to say to her while she was still alive.

Next to her, Stiles is shaking and breathing in short gasps. It’s a bad day, a very bad day, not that they expected any less. He clutches weakly at her hand, blinking through teary eyes as he swallows and tries to get a word out.

 _Panic attack_ , she realizes belatedly, remembering how she managed to stop the last one she was witness to by pressing their lips together. Somehow, she doubts that kissing him would help him calm down now, though. She’s done more research on the attacks since then, in case that Stiles had another one with her, and she’s very thankful that she’s so knowledge oriented, because she manages to keep calm.

Repeating the general rules over in her head such as move the person to a quiet place, she starts wondering how quickly she can get Stiles out of here. They’re in the middle of a pew near the center, so people would be watching if they were to leave and that would probably only stress him out more. Plus, Scott would probably turn around to see what the interruption was about, and then he’d come with them when he really should stay for the rest of the service. That’s not possible, so she needs a better plan of action.

“Stiles, concentrate on your breathing,” she whispers, looking at him and waiting until he meets her eyes before she tells him, “Breathe with me, just like this.” Inhaling deeply, she keeps her eyes on him and holds it until he tries to the same, following the motions even if he does keep gasping quietly.

He tries to do as she tells him, but it’s getting worse, and he closes his eyes and chokes, whispering, “Lydia, Lydia,” like she’ll know what he needs and it’s too much, she doesn’t know what to do, she never knows what to do.

Freezing, she looks up to the front of the church, where Scott and Chris have gathered with two people she’s only seen in the photos on the Argents’ mantle. If she’s remembering correctly, they’re uncles from France or something, and they’ve come to be pall bearers. Allison’s body is going to leave the church, Stiles is still having a panic attack, and people are going to catch on to Stiles’s panic if Lydia doesn’t do something soon.

Stiles grips her hand like a lifeline, and that’s when it comes to her. She shrugs her left shoulder out of her cardigan and lifts his hand in the same instant, placing it directly over her heart before moving his other hand to rest in the same spot on his own chest. “Focus on me,” she whispers, aware that they’ve attracted the attention of Kira and Cora. Still, she doesn’t acknowledge the girls, breathing steadily as she watches Stiles try to do as she’s asked.

“Come on, just breathe with me, I’m right here,” Lydia continues, thankful for the breathing exercises her mother’s yoga instructor always drills them on. _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three._

It takes a minute, but his breathing starts to slow down. Lydia keeps talking, whispering over whatever blessing the priest is giving Allison. It’s too late to help Allison, anyway, and Lydia’s more damned than anyone else could imagine. Stiles is more important, and she keeps with him, always breathing slowly while she comforts him.

When Scott walks down the aisle, he glances at Stiles in confusion, his best friend’s chemo signals clearly lingering even though Stiles is now breathing easier, one hand still clasped in Lydia’s as he exhales slowly. Stiles and Lydia meet his eyes readily, Lydia trying to convey that she’s handled things while also ignoring that her best friend’s body is walking by her for the last time.

She’s hit with the vivid memory of speaking with Allison in the hallway, leaning against a locker and saying, “You are my new best friend.” _You are my only best friend_ , she thinks, a little helpless at the realization. _You are my only best friend, and you’re dead, and you’re not coming back_. Her skin feels too small, like a cheap sweater that shrunk in the wash, and the familiar feeling of nausea springs up on her threatening to relieve her of the toast and eggs her mother forced her to eat this morning. Choking on tears, she takes the hand that isn’t held in Stiles and digs her nails into the fabric of the pew. It’s all a little too much for her, she can’t do this. She can’t do this.

Kira puts a hand gently on her shoulder. “Lydia, we’re going to miss the burial,” she whispers, and she’s right, because when Lydia looks around it’s only the four of them left in the sanctuary. 

Shaking slightly, she nods and stands up. “Let’s get going, then,” she says, waiting until Stiles is on his feet beside her before walking out, not bothering to look behind her.

Cora doesn’t come to the burial, just hugs them all goodbye briefly, her eyes never straying from the ground as she releases Kira and stalks off, car keys jingling. Lydia tries not to let it bother her, because it wasn’t like Allison and Cora even liked each other that much, but still. Still, she should be there. Everyone should be there.

And the cemetery is horrible, because of course it is, and Allison is laid to rest between her mother and her aunt, and Lydia can barely see straight when they lower the coffin in the ground. Chris and Scott lean against each other when the deed is done, too exhausted to pay attention to the bad blood between them, more preoccupied with the blood that soaked into Scott’s shirt that night when he shook with Allison in his arms.

Scott comes to sit next to them, and he holds Kira’s hand lightly in one hand and drums the other. It’s a nervous habit that he’s probably picked up from Stiles, and Lydia isn’t going to let him distract her from her grief, so she grabs that hand in her own and they all form a line. Kira, Scott, her, and Stiles, holding onto each other.

“Dearly beloved,” the priest begins, and Lydia nearly shoots out of her seat, because those are words for weddings, not funerals, and she does not want to be the dearly beloved here. Allison is the only beloved, Allison, the girl rotting in the earth. The only things keeping her grounded are Stiles’s and Scott’s hands, and she slams her eyes shut and blocks out the rest of the priest’s words. That man didn’t know Allison, and she doesn’t want assurances that a god she doesn’t believe in is protecting anyone. No one is protected, unless they do all the work.

That’s the thought swimming through her head when Chris Argent stands up and collects a handful of dirt. He looks at the coffin, as though he’s not sure if that small wooden box is all that there is of his little girl, and then he looks away. Locking eyes with Scott, he intones, “We protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

The code. The code, the new code, Allison’s code. A small sob is forced out of Lydia’s body, and Stiles curls a hand around her back as though that’s going to help. Nevertheless, she does breathe a little easier, nausea subsiding.

-x-

The dreams get worse.

Lydia is standing in the cemetery and looking through the graves, and she doesn’t know what name she’s looking for, only that she hasn’t found it. And then Allison’s headstone is front of her, and the ground trembles. Patches of grass fly away, and then Allison is pushing away the dirt from her face as she takes in a breath. She notices Lydia as she climbs out of the grave, tilting her head and asking, “Why didn’t you save me?” She keeps a smile on her face before her eyes turn a glowing red and fangs protrude from her lips as she demands, “Why didn’t you save me?”

It’s the first dream she’s had since Allison died that doesn’t end up with her or Stiles dying in exceedingly violent ways, but Lydia wakes up regardless. This dream is worse, so much worse, and when she goes back to sleep she dreams it over and over again. Allison clawing her way out of the grave Lydia had basically dug for her, demanding to know why she didn’t have any help.

The sun isn’t up yet, but she can’t go back to bed. Not again. So she turns on her lamp and digs out one of Deaton’s books, flipping to the first bookmarked page that she sees. It’s about choosing ingredients for spells, and it’s more analytical than anything she’s ever noticed in his books, aside from the equations that are few and far between.

Cloves are for luck, and should only be used by a male caster. Apparently spices were gendered back in the day, because there are notes about the masculine powers of clove being compromised if a woman were to use it. Lavender is for lovers, keeping passion alive. All of the purposes listed are romantic, and Lydia wonders if she’ll ever get around to using magic, if she’ll ever be good enough at it to use it in her personal life. Licorice root is for gaining powers over others, and is recommended to be used with bay leaves to protect the caster.

It’s an entire chapter, not just a page, and when Lydia looks up halfway through the sun is over the horizon but not quite at its peak. A quick look at the clock on her nightstand tells her that it’s eleven in the morning, and if she’s going to get anything done today she needs to get dressed and start being productive.

Her head is still hurting, and her limbs feel heavy, so she pulls her covers up higher and gets comfortable with her reading. If she learns enough, maybe she’ll be able to use it for something.

-x-

Leaving calculus with the rest of class since she actually heard the bell this time, Lydia isn’t expecting what she sees when she turns the corner to go to her locker. Isaac is leaning against it, head upturned to the ceiling like he’s expecting something interesting to happen.

“I thought school was for squares, Lahey,” she says, because that’s a lot easier than saying _I looked for you at Allison’s funeral and didn’t see you, you haven’t been in school for the past week and a half, where have you been?_

He rolls his eyes and moves aside, just enough to where she can get to her locker without too much trouble. “Yeah, well, there wasn’t much else to do. Town’s kind of boring, you know?” he asks, smirking hollowly. It’s the look that she’s seen him wear a thousand times, but this time it doesn’t have the same devil may care attitude, all of his recklessness gone from the expression. He’s just keeping up appearances.

Lifting her chin, she dials in her combination and shrugs pointedly. If he’s going to act like nothing’s wrong, then fine, two can play at that game. She’s a better actor than he is, and she’s been playing for a hell of a lot longer. “Sounds like someone doesn’t know how to have a good time.” Purposefully, she keeps her eyes trained on her textbooks as she exchanges AP Calculus for AP Chemistry, grabbing the form for AP Biology, too. Ms. Finch’s classroom is on the way to chemistry, so she won’t have to go out of her way to hand it in. 

With laugh, he shoves away from the wall and grabs her chemistry textbook and biology form, setting them back in her locker and swinging it shut. Smirking, he looks at her and says, “Why don’t you show me one, then?”

It’s a challenge, that much is blatantly obvious. Lydia tilts her head and considers it. There’s only a week before school lets out, it’s not like she’s going to miss much. But it’s the last class of the day, so what’s another hour trapped in a cinderblock prison? Then again, what’s another hour when she has a headache that’s threatening to turn into more whenever the florescent lights flicker from overhead?

“Okay,” she tells him, already feeling lighter as her decision takes hold. Even her head doesn’t hurt as much.

Isaac gives a small laugh, and it’s the first genuine reaction he’s had since they started talking. Lifting the keys to his bike out of his pocket, he spins them around his finger and says, “Come on, then. School’s for squares.”

She’s never really skipped school before. Well, she’d spent periods on the bleachers watching Jackson play lacrosse, and she’d gone to the library instead of to class to help the pack with the latest supernatural crisis, but those were always after giving her teachers semi-believable excuses that they wouldn’t remember later. It’s the first time that she’s ever just left, nothing stopping her but her own reluctance to break the rules.

It helps that she can’t really bring herself to care about the rules. Not when Allison’s dead and so are Isaac’s eyes and Stiles still isn’t back in school and Scott can’t even bring himself to say Allison’s name without aborting halfway through. Not when she can’t sleep and can’t find the research that she wants.

So she walks out behind Isaac, grateful that she doesn’t have to leave her car behind at the school since she rode over on Scott’s bike this morning. With that thought, she fires off a quick text to Scott, telling him to not worry that she’s with Isaac and she’ll see him tomorrow. It was only a little over a week ago that she kept him waiting for an hour and a half, the time passing without her notice as she sat, unblinking in an empty classroom.

“Where to?” Isaac asks, passing her an extra helmet as he gets on the bike and looks at her in earnest.

Looking at him critically, Lydia thinks it over. There’s the diner a few miles away that they always go to, there’s a coffee shop that just opened up, and there’s the cemetery. Not like that’s exactly a social event, though, and she and Allison had planned to try to coffee shop over the summer, so that’s out, too. Diner it is, then. Holding her skirt with one hand, she gets on behind him and considers the helmet. It’s going to ruin her hair, but it’s not like she had the energy to fix it this morning, and the alternative is possibly being flung onto the asphalt at a high rate of speed.

Her mind flashes to Chris Argent’s unforgiving stare at his daughter’s coffin, then to her mother holding her hand the morning before the funeral. She tugs the helmet on, thankful that Isaac hasn’t commented on her elevated heartbeat. “I’m feeling like milkshakes. My treat,” she tells him, with a shaky grin as she leans against him.

-x-

When she walks through the door at half past eight, her mother is giving her a veiled look that Lydia can’t quite decipher. Then again, she supposes that she doesn’t really need to decipher it. Teenagers have been dropping like flies around town, and she didn’t exactly send her mom a text saying where she was.

Taking off her jacket, Lydia gives a small smiles and says, “I was out with a friend. I’m sorry I forgot to text.” She’s not really all that sorry, but saying it will probably mean she gets to avoid a lecture, and she’s willing to let her false sincerity shine through if it means she’s off the hook.

Eyes on the driveway, where Isaac has pulled his helmet back on and is backing out, Natalie finally dares to ask, “Isn’t that the boy Allison was seeing?” She does her best to not sound judgmental, but there’s only so much surprise that she can take after finding out her daughter is seeing the boy her best friend had been dating. Girls trade boyfriends sometimes, yes, and she understands that, but the situation changes when one of them dies.

“It’s not like that,” Lydia says, sighing as she tries to explain. “He’s a friend, and we just… We talked. He needed someone to talk to, Mom. I did, too.” Even though they hadn’t talked about Allison, avoided that topic like the plague, it still permeated the entire conversation, unspoken but ever-present.

Nodding, Natalie turns away from the window. It’s been almost two weeks, her daughter is still grieving, and that boy must be, too. They were both close to Allison, it’s only natural that they feel comfortable talking about her with each other, better to share grief with someone who knows how you feel than feel the need to justify. Lydia hasn’t been sleeping, she knows because she never sees the light in her bedroom go out. There are books next to her bed that she doesn’t know where they came from, but her daughter has been reading college textbooks since she turned fourteen, the fact that she’s turning to knowledge instead of taking the time to acknowledge her feelings isn’t that surprising. It also isn’t healthy, but again, it hasn’t even been two weeks.

Lydia has always been so strong, so guarded. It’s rare to see her without some sort of façade protecting her, and that’s just the way that she likes it. It’s purposeful and planned, and she’s not about to people assume that they know more about her than she dares to let on. Still, in front of her mother, she can’t help but let her shoulders drop as she leans against the wall for support. She’s so tired, so tired, and she doesn’t know what to do.

Hand dropping to her daughter’s shoulder, Natalie says gently, “Honey.” That’s all she gets out, though, unsure of where to go from there, unsure of what Lydia needs to hear from her.

“I’m fine,” Lydia starts, blinking back tears for some unknown reason. She’s holding it together, really, she’s doing fine, but if her mother dares to hug her she’ll be a sobbing mess in moments, she’s absolutely sure of it. It’s just that being with Isaac took so much out of her, and she keeps thinking of spells about how to change luck and bring health and fix friendships. She doesn’t need any of her friendships fixed, she just needs one returned.

Swallowing, she looks to her mother and forces a smile. “Really, Mom. I’m fine,” she repeats, because if she says it enough it will come true, like a small spell that she can force into existence.

Despite the fact that she clearly doesn’t believe her daughter, Natalie smooths a hand over Lydia’s hair and wonders when the circles under her eyes became so prominent. “You need to get some sleep,” she says, wishing that there was some better way for her to help.

For the first time, Lydia wonders if she should tell her. About the nightmares, about the Nogitsune holding her under water, about Allison dying, about Allison shouldering her way out of the grave by sheer force of will and blaming Lydia for letting them bury her. About why she can’t sleep, about why every time she climbs into bed it feels like she’s only hurrying a death sentence that seems imminent. The words catch in her throat, though, and all she can do is nod, wishing that she could do more.

-x-

The equations from Deaton’s books are coming together, and Lydia can’t quite believe how well everything fits. Each spell is a problem, the ingredients serving as different variables, and she’s catching on to how the vocal part pulls it all together. She stays up later, sleeping even less, piecing together how it all works. And Stiles seems better than he did before, like maybe he doesn’t need her help, but she still keeps working.

It’s all going to be perfect, she sure of it. What’s going to be perfect? She’s less sure of that, but still. It’s all going to be perfect, and that’s what keeps her going, that and the feeling that she’s being propelled to the most important discovery of her life. If they gave Field’s medals for work in the supernatural, she’d be preparing a thesis, she’s that confident in it. Deaton lends her books, she reads through them as quickly as she can, and she works out the problems in her notebook that’s quickly looking like it will need a replacement soon.

Scott doesn’t know what she’s looking for, and she hasn’t told him yet. He’s always been so wary with knowledge of supernatural, and she doesn’t know why. Ignorance has never been bliss, no matter how often the old adage is repeated. Still, she doesn’t tell him for fear he’ll make her stop.

The work is coming along quickly, helped by the fact she’s almost stopped sleeping entirely. Three cups of coffee in the morning before school, a travel mug that she drinks in first period, a coffee to go with lunch, and by the time she’s back home she’s ready to brew a new pot. She might only sleep two hours a night, but Allison keeps dying or blaming Lydia for her death, and Stiles is still under the Nogitsune’s control, but now there’s a new addition.

Sometimes, when she dreams, she dreams of Scott dying while he tries to protect them. The Oni come and approach them, and Scott dives in front of a sword to protect all of them, and then they die because they’re not strong enough without him.

She can’t tell if that dream is an improvement or not, because at least in real life Scott is alive and well. More than can be said for Allison, in terms of alive, and more than can be said for Stiles, in terms of well. Stiles is doing better, though, and even if he won’t be back at school before the year’s over he’s at least been doing the work she’s given him. He’s still in the running for valedictorian, and she’s pleased that he’s still trying to challenge her. 

Allison is still dead, and Lydia still loses time, but things are getting better.

She doesn’t have a best friend, but she has Isaac, and Scott, and Stiles, and she has her equations, and things are getting better. Not her sleep schedule, but just things in general. And maybe her mom doesn’t believe her, but they are, and she’s getting better, too, because there’s not another option. Even if the rose bushes she vomited on have come into bloom despite the fact that it’s December, and even if she’s starting to hear voices again in that hazy area between sleep and consciousness. Things are getting better, really, they are.

Reading more and sleeping less, it’s not that she feels stable, but the musty smell of the books Deaton lends her has become more comforting than her pillow, and if her hand starts shaking while she writes then no one has to know. The soft crinkle of turning pages acts like a lullaby, but she resists the temptation because she’s on the verge of something important, something meaningful, something that’s going to help. So she keeps reading, keeps taking notes, keeps working through the variables until they make sense.

-x-

Stretching, Stiles runs his hand through his hair as he looks around his room. Scott is sprawled out on the bed, looking at some sort of schedule on his laptop, and Lydia is perched on the edge of the desk, kicking her heels slightly as she leafs through one of Deaton’s books. “So, no one thought they should me we were hanging out over here today?” he asks, tossing his car keys onto the ever-growing pile of laundry in the corner.

“Figured you’d show up eventually,” Lydia comments, not even looking up from her book. “Plus, your dad told us to just come up here, you’d be back soon enough. And, hey, look at that, he was right.”

Scott nods, taking out a headphone as he scrolls. “Besides, what are you trying to hide from us?” he asks, raising his eyebrows mockingly at his best friend before looking around the room curiously.

“Porn,” Lydia says, the offhand comment accompanied with a slight wave of her hand. Then she glances at Stiles and shrugs, which is the closest to an apology that he can expect from her. “My guess is…” She follows Scott’s example, glancing around the room, but it’s with a purpose. “In the nightstand drawer, or in the closet,” she guesses, spinning a strand of hair around her finger as she smiles, all teeth and fake innocence.

With a roll of his eyes, Stiles steps protectively in front of his closet before he can think too much about it. _How does she know?_ He knows better to ask though, because that would lead to a discussion about how Lydia might be both a banshee and a psychic, and she doesn’t look like she’s in a good enough mood for that.

“Dude, that’s so obvious,” Scott tells him, because leave it to Stiles to keep his porn in the most normal place ever.

“Fuck off, you keep yours under the hamper,” Stiles shoots back, watching with triumph as Scott pales visibly and gives a panicked look to Lydia, who looks far too amused by the situation to genuinely care. If he’s going down, he’s taking the whole damn ship with him, and that’s a promise.

Flipping a page, Lydia readjusts herself to get more comfortable and stop the wood from digging into her skin. It’s so normal, so beyond normal, even with how fucked up they are. It feels like how it used it, and maybe this is the first time that she’s actually felt okay since Allison died. It’s certainly the first time she’s ever been able to truly understand that they’ve made it through a Darach and an Alpha pack and Peter Hale, and they’ll be able to make it through this, too. Life moves on, and that means they will, too. Even if it still doesn’t feel quite right to do so.

Shrugging off his jacket, Stiles tosses that only the laundry and rolls his eyes when Lydia gives him a weak glare. “There’s a method to the madness,” he lies, but it is a little true. His car keys are always somewhere around the second layer of laundry, and that’s good enough for him. It’s not like she has to live with it, anyway.

“If you insist.” She’s humoring him, because she doesn’t simply take other people’s words for any real value, but especially not Stiles’s when he’s talking about cleanliness. She’s pretty sure there’s some type of fungus growing in the bathroom down the hall. Either that or an incomplete science project that’s begun to take over. Tapping her fingers on the edge, she daydreams about the fungus growing into a sentient being, reminiscent of Audrey II.

He pulls the desk chair away and sits down, grabbing a slinky from somewhere on the floor. “Light reading for Ms. Martin as usual, but what are you doing, Scott?” He can’t quite figure out the spreadsheet on the laptop screen.

Scott waves him over enthusiastically. “The Mets are playing the Giants in early August, we have to go,” he says, enlarging a few things so that Stiles is able to make out the dates and times. “This summer let’s just tour the state and pick up minor league games summer, and we can finish off with this. Road trip,” he says, scrolling through the tickets offered from various sources, trying to find good seats and a decent deal.

With a laugh, Stiles joins him, collapsing on the bed and waving off Scott’s cries, because the man is a werewolf, he doesn’t need to overreact just because Stiles fell on his calf. “Baseball in the summer time, living the American dream,” he says, leaning back and thinking it over. “Want to come, Lydia? What are your plans?”

“I’m-” She cuts herself off, because she doesn’t have plans any more. _I’m going to go up and down the coast with Allison, spending time on the beach getting our skin sunburned and our hair sticky with salt_. That’s no longer the plan, because of course it’s not. She doesn’t have plans other than a two week trip to see her father, as per the court-ordered custody agreement her parents settled on. “Nothing,” she finally whispers.

Stiles and Scott exchange some sort of look that would take too much energy for her to figure out, so she ignores it like she’s been ignoring the fact that her mother is more careful around her, ignores it like she and Isaac ignore the topic of Allison when they hang out, ignores it like the ever-growing bags under her eyes.

“Oh,” Stiles says. Because of course he realizes why she doesn’t have plans, and she only wants to scream a little bit, which is an improvement from how she felt last week when her mother mentioned Allison’s name and Lydia couldn’t help it when she jumped out of her skin, knocking over a glass of water in the process.

Drumming his fingers on the bed, Scott looks at her and gives her a smile. “Come to the baseball games, Lydia.”

 _If only it were that easy_ , she thinks, leaning back against the wall and balancing the book in her lap. Some part of her wants to, knows that it would be good to get out of town while memories of Allison are so fresh in her mind. Most of her wants to stay, though, because she can’t leave Allison behind.

Then she’s struck with the thickest sense of guilt she’s ever experienced, coiling from her stomach to her throat, and all of her limbs are heavy with the effort that it takes to not just curl up on the floor and ask for them to leave her alone for forever. She can’t leave Allison behind, it’s been two weeks since she’s been dead, Lydia can’t just start forgetting about her. Her chest feels tight, like a giant weight is being pressed into her. What kind of person is she, sitting around and hanging out with her friends like nothing is wrong? Her best friend is dead, everything is wrong. Everything is wrong and it’s never going to get better, because Allison is stuck in the ground and Lydia isn’t.

A hand comes to rest hesitantly on her knee, and she looks up to find Stiles’s whiskey eyes staring back at her. “It’s going to be okay,” he says, tone serious but purposefully light, like they don’t have to acknowledge the severity of everything if she doesn’t want to, and she hates it.

Bile rises in her throat, and she pushes it down, because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself. There isn’t a rose bush nearby, and even if there was it would go into bloom because there’s something _wrong_ with her. And Stiles is wrong, too, because he thinks that everything’s going to be fine. Hell, he probably believes it, too, and Lydia can barely stomach that thought. It’s not going to be okay, it’s never going to be okay again.

-x-

The next morning, after a particularly terrifying dream of Peter Hale holding Allison’s hand as she climbed out of the grave, Lydia calls Isaac. And apparently it doesn’t matter that it’s only nine in the morning on a Saturday, because he answers after the second ring. He’s probably having trouble sleeping, too.

“Teach me how to drive a motorcycle,” she says in lieu of an introduction, because she’s not interested in beating around the bush. She needs something to do, needs something new to learn, needs a challenge to keep her busy.

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” he answers, easy as breathing with the way that he doesn’t even bother to question her. Doesn’t ask why the sudden demand, doesn’t even tell her that it isn’t safe. 

The hour passes slowly, and Lydia keeps her eyes on the clock while she finishes transferring one of Deaton’s books into a pdf file. It’s the twenty-first century, backups are not only heavily encouraged but necessary, and she’s not going to let them lose any knowledge in case something happens to the fragile paper it’s bound together with. She doesn’t even want to think about how much information must have burned away in the Hale house fire.

Luckily, she doesn’t have to think about it, because Isaac pulls into her driveway and gives a salute to her bedroom window. She grabs her bag and a hair tie, making her way down the stairs and calling out a goodbye to her mother before leaving through the front door and breathing in the outside air deeply. It isn’t that her house is stuffy, but she feels stifled, and the last thing that she wants right now is to be indoors.

“Get on,” Isaac tells her, tossing her a helmet and rolling his eyes as she takes her time to pull her hair back into the type of artfully messy ponytails that girls seem so obsessed with. As soon as she’s ready, though, he motions for her to climb on behind him. “I’m not teaching you on the streets, Martin, you’d kill yourself.”

She blushes, a little embarrassed that she’d actually expected him to teach her as soon as he got here. Still, she follows his instructions, grateful that she’d worn jeans instead of the skirt and tights option that had been her alternative. This is sensible for learning how to drive a motorcycle, even if it’s not quite as cute. This way, at least, she doesn’t have to worry about flashing passing by cars and holding down the fabric when a wind comes her way.

They spend the morning in the parking lot of the strip mall that hasn’t opened yet, because there’s no traffic, and Isaac delights in shouting “There’s a fucking _car_ , Lydia!” just to see her scream and swerve out of the way of absolutely nothing. And she’s not good, not really, but she’s learning, and she’s getting her balance.

It doesn’t come naturally, and thank God, because she needs a challenge. Not to mention social interaction that doesn’t make her feel like Allison’s missing, thank you, Scott and Stiles. She and Isaac never hung out together with Allison, so it never feels like there’s a person missing whenever they get together – and, God, she needs this, needs someone she doesn’t have to worry with, someone she can use as a release instead of having to stay perfect for.

The wind against her arms is perfect, and now Lydia knows why Isaac and Scott are protective of their bikes. If something helped her to feel like this all the time, she’d be worried over it coming to harm, too.

Coming to a stop, she puts on foot down and takes off the helmet as she giggles and turns to Isaac. His blond curls fall in front of his eyes, and he pushes them back as he grins at her. “Not bad. Want to stop for lunch?”

He drives them to the usual spot, and they get the back table in the corner like usual, even though the rest of the pack isn’t there to fill the seats. Just her and Isaac, and it feels like they’re holding court, planning out a century in front of them with all the empty space. He orders a fry masterpiece that she pretends to be disgusted by, and he pretends not to notice when she steals a few off of his plate. Talking about the bike, about maybe doing this one day a week so that she keeps practicing, it feels so easy to forget that her life is a mess.

With a laugh, Isaac squirts a packet of ketchup onto his plate and says, “Allison would have liked riding, I think.”

She freezes, fork poised in front of her mouth before she pauses and sets it back down again. She isn’t very hungry anymore, really, and the thought of food just makes her stomach do flip flops, and that’s not even talking about the grease she can practically taste in the air. They’ve never talked about her, never. Not about Allison.

Clearing her voice, Lydia tries to find words, but nothing comes to mind. Allison would have liked riding, yes, because she loved a thrill and a challenge, and she wasn’t going to be intimidated just because some white haired nurse told her all of the worst things that could happen. “She would have gotten very good, very fast, and within two months she’d have been driving circles around you and Scott.” That’s an understatement, though, because Allison would have been driving better within one month, and they both know it.

Isaac allows a small smile to cross his face, but only for a moment, as though he realizes it’s wrong to smile when the girl he’s smiling about it dead. Lydia knows the feeling, believe it or not.

From there, they finish their meals and pay the bills, but when Isaac drives her back to her house, Lydia can’t shake the feeling that something has changed. Something small, and she can’t put her finger on it, but something is different between them, something important that she can’t name but needs to. It’s a small feeling, though, and she shakes it off, discomfort gone by the time that they get to her street and she sees her mother drop the curtain.

“Your mom looks worried about you,” Isaac comments, because of course he noticed it, too.

Taking off her helmet and passing it back to him, she shakes her hair out of the ponytail and tries to not be annoyed that she didn’t properly curl it before leaving in the morning. “Teenagers don’t have quite as high of a life expectancy as they used to around here.” She wants him to leave it alone, because she can’t deal with this now.

He shrugs, accepting the helmet before holding it out to her. “If we’re doing this weekly, I’ll just let you keep it for now. It’ll be easier for you, that way,” he tells her, and it shouldn’t feel as meaningful as it does when she reaches out and takes it back. He smiles at her, a bright and golden thing that could bring a thousand girls to their knees for sheer innocence, and watches until she’s at the door and waving him off before he laughs and drives away.

_-x-_

The school semester ends, and Lydia is relieved. For the most part. Because no school means that she doesn’t have to worry about nagging Stiles to do his assignments, or meeting up with Scott when she’s supposed to after the bell rings if they’re meeting to go to Deaton’s, or setting her alarm ad lying the night awake because she’s too paralyzed with fear that she won’t hear it go off and she’ll stay in her nightmares forever.

School also means having more time to herself, which is not something she’s excited for. Even if she does get to spend more time riding with Isaac – and she’s gotten good enough that she’s gone driving on actual state roads. It means more time with her equations, sure, and those are working well enough, but it also means more time spent trying to keep her dreams away. Stiles isn’t always the Nogitsune in them, no, now he’s held captive by Peter Hale, or he’s trying to save Scott when Scott dies saving them, or he’s chiseling a new headstone in the graveyard.

It’s not healthy, she knows, that she’s been dreaming these things. It must be normal, though. Normal, at least, for teenagers who deal with the supernatural and lose their best friends to Oni serving a demon that’s older than the country she lives in. Stiles and Scott probably have them, too, and so does Isaac. They just don’t talk about it.

Not that she wants to talk about it, but it’d be nice to know that at least she’s not alone.

Everyone is getting amped up for Christmas, her mother included. The Martin’s mansion of a house is covered with tinsel, and the nativity has been set up on the lawn with painstaking detail. It’s a little too much, and on any other house it would look tacky, but theirs is just big enough to get away with it while still looking classy. And Lydia has always loved Christmas, but this year she’s not looking forward to the things that she usually enjoys.

Somehow, she doubts that she’ll end up on an ice rink this year with Stiles gaping at her side and Scott and Allison a thousand miles away, even though they’re only on the other side of the rink. She doesn’t want to go ice skating, or take walks in the brisk weather. She wants to stay inside and have everyone leave her alone.

It’s a dream that is looking increasingly unrealistic by the minute, as her mother is currently standing in her doorframe and announcing that they’re going to visit family for Christmas. Waving airplane tickets in front of her, Natalie gives her a supportive smile and looks for any sign of excitement. “We haven’t seen anyone from that side of family for two years, except for when Marie dropped by last Thanksgiving. Doesn’t it sound like fun?”

Lydia remembers that Thanksgiving, when her mother had compromised for not letting her father come to dinner by allowing Jackson to come instead. They’d been halfway through the salad, Jackson poking at the arugula and making a face like it was going to poke back, when there was a knock at the door and Aunt Marie swooped in.

Apparently she’d been somewhere on the coast with a boyfriend when she’d dumped him and made her way to her sister’s home. And she’d only been too happy to meet Jackson, winking at Lydia throughout the night when he wasn’t looking. It is not one of Lydia’s fonder holiday memories, believe it or not.

Flying out to North Carolina on a day’s notice doesn’t seem sound like fun, but telling her mother is only going to result in a lecture about the importance of family. Lydia knows how important family is, thank you very much, she’s very aware of how important family is, and that’s why she can’t leave. Not when Scott sometimes calls her at two in the morning because he needs help with something supernatural, not when Stiles still shakes when someone says Allison’s name, not when she and Isaac are only just starting to get to know each other.

They’re her real family, they’re her pack. Not a group of strangers whose get together might as well function as a prolonged Alcohol Anonymous meeting. No, wait, they can’t be AA because there’s too much booze. 

“When did you decide we were going to North Carolina?” Lydia asks, trying to keep the skepticism from leaking too much into her voice.

Natalie catches on in a second, used to all of Lydia’s tricks after nearly seventeen years of living with her daughter. “I was on the phone with Nana today, and she mentioned how long it’s been since we’ve all seen each other. I started looking up flights, and these ones were last minute, yes, but we’re going home.”

In all of her sixteen and a half years, Lydia has never once thought of her grandparent’s sprawling estate as home. It’s where Natalie grew up, yes, but Lydia grew up on the west coast, the rocky Pacific Ocean in front of her as she learned to walk on the shores until they moved to Beacon Hills. It is the travesty of her mother’s family that she isn’t an east coast girl, but they’re much too proper to say that. No, instead they just pick at Natalie and say, _oh, Lydia always dresses so well, those skirts and blouses are adorable, our girls wear such_ sensible _things_. Or, if they’re feeling less subtle and it’s after a generous glass of wine, _The weather really_ must _be warmer your way, Natalie, if the short things Lydia wears are anything to go by_.

Lydia will say bad things about her father’s family and that’s kind of a given at this point, but at least she’s never heard one of her aunts from his side imply that she dresses like a slut.

Sighing, she sets aside the book of Deaton’s that she’d been working on, and she gives Natalie her full attention. “Mom, I just don’t feel like I can leave right now.” She needs to be sweet about it, regretful, not to mention wistful. There can’t be any room for mistakes, because otherwise she’s guaranteed to spend the Christmas break surrounded by drunk strangers with a southern drawl who comment about how thin she’s getting.

“You can’t leave?” Natalie can’t believe this. “You can bring those books you’re obsessed with on the flight. I assure you, your eyes will work just as well on the plane, and you can get your reading done then.” Moving all the way into the room, she looks around and takes in how messy it’s gotten.

In all honesty, she should probably just break the news. Scott’s mom knows, and Stiles’s dad knows, what’s the difference if her mom were to be let in on Scotty’s little secret? It crosses her mind to just blurt it out, but she can’t just make these calls on her own. “I know it sounds crazy, but Stiles and Scott need me right now. Neither of them are handling things well, right now.” Not that she’s handling them much better, but the point still stands.

“Scott and Stiles need you?” Natalie asks, drawing her eyebrows together in confusion. Because it doesn’t make sense, why her daughter needs to be with the boy that her best friend used to date but wasn’t dating at the time that she died and his best friend. She’s never been close to these boys before.

Biting her lip, Lydia figures out her trump cards. And they’re not her trump cards, but they’ll work well enough. She’ll make time to feel sorry for it later. “We’re friends, Mom. And it’s not just Allison, Christmas is really hard on them. Stiles’s mom passed away around this time, and Scott’s dad left a week before Christmas a few years ago.”

“Oh, honey,” Natalie breathes, sitting down on the edge of the bed and resting her hand comfortingly on Lydia’s.

It’s cruel to abuse those things when they’re clearly what haven’t been bothering her friends, but she’s not about to go to the other side of the country for a month. “I don’t want to leave them right now, not with all of that going on. Like I said, we’re friends.” _Please, please, buy it_ , she chants in her mind, fingers crossed.

Natalie wrings her hands and glances around, apparently distressed. And Lydia could have predicted that if she’d been paying attention, but occurs to her that she hasn’t really been paying much attention to her mother at all. Not during this conversation, not during the countless interactions they’ve had since Allison’s death. She’s been preoccupied with other things. Magic, Stiles, her nightmares, other things. And maybe she should take the trip.

Her mother would be thrilled if Lydia came with her, happy to get her out of Beacon Hills for a while and give her the proper space to recover. It could be helpful, certainly, but mostly she keeps coming back to the worry about something happening while she’s gone. Neither Stiles nor Scott is back to normal, and it’s not like she is, either, but three is better than two. She needs to stay for them, just to make sure that the town doesn’t get blown up or put under mind control while the high school is out for break.

She’s a bad daughter. Not that she’s ever been a real model in that department, but it’s a startling to realize all the same. Still, even knowing that, Lydia can’t help how she lets a tear come to surface as she says, “I need to stay.”

Brushing her hand over Lydia’s long hair, Natalie sighs and asks, “Would you like me to stay with you?”

“It’s fine,” Lydia answers, the response coming before she thinks it over. Not that she needs her mother to stay, no, but staying in the house alone seems a little daunting. She doesn’t do well being alone, not since Allison, and even when they’re not together it’s still a comfort to know that there’s another person with her.

But her mom is right, she hasn’t seen her side of the family in years. So she sticks to her decision, offering a small smile though to assure herself and says, “Really, Mom. You should go see them. I’m sure they miss you.”

Sighing, Natalie looks away. “I just think it would be good for you. I know you’ve been having a hard time since Allison passed away, you two were very close. And I’m glad that you’re helping your other friends through this, but you need to take some time for yourself.” She purses her lips, wishing that she knew what to say.

With a small, encouraging smile, Lydia tries to think of something to fix the rift between them. “I’m trying to take time, but it’s hard, especially when I keep thinking of how hard everyone else must be taking it. I’ll spend the break in full relaxation mode, though, you’ll see, and when you come home I’ll be like I was before,” she says, tying her words together with the most reassuring look she can put together on such short notice.

Natalie sighs again and leaves, placing the plane ticket on her dresser as a promise, it’s there if Lydia wants it. Watching her mother go, Lydia curls her fingers into the sheets and tries to keep from crying, because she can’t break now. She’ll be better when the break is over. She has to be.

-x-

The plane ticket stays unused, and when Lydia gets back from dropping her mother off at the airport she spends an hour trying to distract herself with the books before admitting defeat. She calls Scott instead, tells him to bring the pack because she’s ordering pizza and putting on a movie. If they’re going to get over Allison’s death, they need to start to be okay with seeing everyone together. And not just gathered in a small corner at the wake.

Scott shows up an hour later with Isaac, Kira, Stiles, and, surprisingly enough, Malia. They all have their own contributions, and everyone piles into her living room comfortably enough, Scott revealing that Cora’s gone back to South America and Stiles saying that Derek has just left Beacon Hills for the foreseeable future.

“We’re watching something funny,” Lydia declares, hands on her hips as though she’s daring any of them to challenge her decision. Comedy is the only choice, anything else would be too emotionally involved.

The last thing any of them need right now is to get emotionally involved.

Luckily, they’re all too relieved that she’s already made the choice for them, and so that’s taken care of. _21 Jump Street_ is the pick of the night, one less thing that they have to all worry about. The pizza is a different story entirely, however, with two werewolves, one were-coyote, and three others to feed. They end up getting two sheet pizzas, and Lydia throws another in there because she’s willing to bet Scott and Isaac will finish it off, too.

Everything is taken care of at last, and finally they’re left to the last element of get-togethers: conversation. It’s harder than she thought it’d be, especially because Malia is sitting there for some unknown reason, but they find a way to manage. She and Isaac talk about how she’s been learning how to drive a motorcycle, and suddenly Kira is tugging on Scott’s sleeve and telling him that she wants to learn, too.

The movie plays, the pizza is delivered, and the conversation doesn’t quite die. There are a few awkward lulls, like when Isaac asks who wants his crust and everyone waits for Allison to snatch it from his hands before they can answer. For the most part, it’s fun. Awkward, of course, but that’s to be expected.

“I have the sequel,” Lydia offers when the credits have started rolling. Kira is giggling into Scott’s arm, apparently still perfectly in love with him despite the fact that he’s still not over Allison. Stiles is sitting next to Malia, their arms next to each other but not quite touching, and Lydia can only tell that it’s a matter of time before something happens between them. Isaac is next to her, leaning against her legs with his own tossed over to Scott and Kira.

“Sequel, sequel,” Scott and Stiles start to chant in unison, fist pumping.

Isaac changes the movie, telling her to stay put, and he brings in the third sheet pizza from the kitchen while he’s up. “Ew, you got veggie. It’s like you hate us or something,” he says, wrinkling his nose but nevertheless taking three slices and passing one of those off to Scott, who pouts but still accepts the food.

“Or something,” she mentions, dragging her fingers unthinkingly through his hair when he sits back against her legs again. And she must be imagining things, because Stiles shoots her an unimpressed look before rolling his eyes.

Nothing’s going on with her and Isaac. Besides, even if there were, it’s not like he has room to judge. She’s not the one nearly cuddling with the girl she met in an insane asylum. Excuse her, _mental health institution_. Whatever, he can keep his girl who is still getting used to the fact she doesn’t have a fur coat, and Lydia will keep her veggie pizza and weekly motorcycle rides. Not that those mean anything, anyway.

By the time the second movie ends, the last pizza is down to corner pieces, and three of the six are asleep. Only Lydia, Stiles, and Isaac remain awake, and Lydia is content. For the first time in a very long time, she finally feels like things are how they’re supposed to be. Without Allison, but she’s getting used to that.

Glancing over at the clock, Stiles casts a look at Malia and then says, “We should get going, it’s getting late.”

“You all can just stay here,” Lydia says. She’s okay, but she doesn’t want to be alone. There’s too much house and not enough her when she’s alone, and she doesn’t want to be that way right now. “My mom is seeing family for Christmas, and even if she was home she wouldn’t care.” Well, she might, but Lydia just won’t say that.

Shrugging, he tries to come up with an excuse. “Really, it’s okay. It’s your house, by all means, we’ll leave.”

Isaac turns to her, an eyebrow arched, and comments, “You didn’t tell me your mom was out of town.”

Stiles’s face freezes for a second and then he suddenly declares, “Yeah, we’ll stay. That sounds great, Lydia, thanks for having us.” His voice is loud enough that Malia nearly wakes up, but then she goes back to curling protectively around a pillow and they all let out a collective breath of relief.

Unsure of what caused Stiles to change his mind, she can’t say she’s unhappy. The more people here, the less likely it is that she’ll feel like the walls are caving in on her. “I’ll grab some pillows from the closet then,” she says, waiting for Isaac to shift before standing up and walking out of the living room. 

Stiles kind of throws a blanket over Scott and Kira, who have stayed immobile throughout the interaction. He does the same with Malia, only taking care to make sure that that action doesn’t wake her. When he looks around and doesn’t see any more blankets, he motions for Isaac to stay where he is and follows down the hall that Lydia went down. “I’ve got it, don’t worry,” he tells the other boy.

In the hall, he finds Lydia, standing frozen in front of the unopened closet. Her hands shake slightly at her sides, and it only takes Stiles a moment to realize that this is how his father finds him some days. Gently putting a hand on her shoulder, he wonders if he’ll make it worse if he tries to bring her out of it.

“How long was I?” Lydia whispers from beside him a few second later, using a shaking hand to smooth her hair down. She opens the closet and takes out a few pillows, glancing behind her suspiciously when he’s styed quiet.

Swallowing, he shrugs and collects the pile of blankets on the second shelf. “I only just got here, so maybe two minutes? How often does it happen?” Because he’s never this calm when he loses time, he goes into panic attacks sometimes when he comes out of it. And Lydia just seems to accept it, moves on as soon as it’s over.

She shrugs, closing the closet door. “Not often.” 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, unable to just let it go as easily as she can.

“Not particularly.” Pulling her lips together, she gives him a tight smile, because she doesn’t need this right now. She doesn’t want to talk about it, not with her mother, not with Isaac, and not with Stiles. Even if he would be able to understand better than anyone else, telling him makes it real and she can’t let it be real.

Before he can press her any further, she brushes past him, eyes ahead as she totally disregards him. It’s catty, and reminiscent of a time not so far ago when she barely even knew who he was, but it’s the only move in her arsenal that she can think of at the moment.

-x-

That night, whenever everyone else has fallen asleep, Lydia creeps up to her room and takes out her books. With more people in the house, she’s not going to take the chance that she’ll wake up screaming. And the only way to ensure that is to make sure that doesn’t go to sleep, which means she’s staying up and investing her time in finding out whether Beacon Hills is at risk of a Brownie infestation given the recent weather patterns.

Cold winds are coming in from the east according to the forecast on her phone, and Lydia absent-mindedly charts the likelihood of Brownies in the abandoned supermarket on the edge of town. She isn’t paying attention to the clock, before the more she watches it, the slower it moves. 

“Woke up with a hunger for knowledge?” Stiles asks, leaning against her doorframe and glancing around to take in his surroundings. He smirks and walks in when she gives an answering smile.

Setting the book aside, she tosses her hair over her shoulder and hopes that her under eye concealer is holding up. She really doesn’t need Stiles knowing that she hasn’t slept well since Allison died. “Well, curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. Just trying to get my satisfaction in. What did you wake up for?”

He shrugs, stifling a small laugh. “Would you believe me if I said I never went to sleep?”

She really would, but she shrugs all the same. Best not to give herself away too quickly, even if she does have an idea of where this conversation is going. She doesn’t want to give him any more ammunition than he’s already accumulated, and so she stays quiet, spinning her pen and saying, “Restless night?” as she watches him carefully.

“Restless year,” Stiles retorts, sitting down with her and leaning to get a look at her work. “Please tell me that we aren’t due for another supernatural showdown. I thought these things took breaks on the holidays.” The last way that he wants to spend his break is trying to hunt creatures down and forcing them to stop some madness.

Looking over her chart, Lydia follows the lines and then shakes her head. “They’ll miss us by a few miles, but we might catch some on the eastern side of town next week. Maybe tell Scott to keep an eye out, but I wouldn’t worry too much. We’ve seen worse.”

“Lived through it, too,” he says, the words coming out before he can stop them.

“Not all of us.”

It’s unfair, though, and she knows it. It’s not like it’s Stiles’s fault that some evil spirit possessed him and caused Allison’s death, and it’s not his fault that she can’t sleep, and she needs to learn to move past things. It’s hard to move past it though, when the Nogitsune is still wearing his skin in her dreams.

She coughs to clear her throat and then says, meekly, “I’m sorry.” And she is, but her feelings are coming up from a thousand different layers and she doesn’t even know how she feels. Just tired.

He shrugs. “Nothing to be sorry for.” He goes quiet, and it’s uncharacteristic of him, and then admits, “I keep dreaming about her death. Every time, I’m the one that plunges the sword through her chest, and I know that’s not what happened, but I see it that way when I close my eyes. In the worst dreams, though, she’s looking me in the eyes while it happens. She never looks surprised.” His words carry a deadly weight with them, and Lydia knows that if she tries to comfort him she’ll only pass her burden onto him.

Still, she owes it to Stiles. To let him know that he’s not alone. “I keep dreaming about her crawling out of her grave. Covered in dirt and still bleeding from her stomach, and she looks at me and asks how I let this happen to her. I was supposed to protect her. I didn’t want her to come after me,” she whispers.

“Nothing could have stopped her once she knew you were in danger. That’s just who Allison is – was. That’s who she was,” he says, uncomfortable with the change in tense.

He’s right, of course, because Allison wasn’t going to let anyone walk into a fight without backup, and if that meant she had to reload her bow and holster a few more Chinese ring daggers, then so be it. Lydia knows that, she knows nothing could stop her, and yet. It still feels like her fault. “Sometimes, when she comes out of the grave, she has red eyes and Peter Hale is standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder. His eyes are red, too.”

Flopping back onto the bed, Stiles lets out a long breath and stares up at her ceiling. “We’re pretty fucked up.”

Yeah, they are. Lydia thinks that she’d like for her life to go back to normal. No more creatures from _Goosebumps_ or shitty horror films, no life or death situations to go along with her usual homework. Just her, the way things were before, when the only truly frustrating thing in her life was convincing Jackson to watch _The Notebook_.

She doesn’t say that, though. The words are heavy on her tongue, and she’s not quite strong enough to force them off. Instead, she reaches up and finds the knob on her nightstand lamp. When the room has been consumed in darkness, she lays down next to Stiles and lets herself be thankful that he’s not speaking, because if he did it would mean they’d have to talk about it and she doesn’t think she can do that. Not yet, anyway.

Instead of talking, she slips her hand into his and pretends she doesn’t hear his small intake of breath. It’s easier to close her eyes and drift off into the first dreamless sleep she’s had in weeks.

-x-

Break, or at least the first week of it, passes as she expected it would. She reads and takes notes and does research so intricate that she has to brag about it to Stiles, who talks about it with her and pretends that he’s not worried about her sleeping habits. They haven’t talked about their dreams since then, or the fact that she didn’t have any that night, because the topic seems far too weighty. Isaac comes over occasionally, and most of the time they go riding, but sometimes they just stay in and watch a movie or else he cooks with her. Once, they get so bored that she unearths the 1000-piece puzzle of the Great Wall of China that she’s never had the patience to complete.

Within five hours, the Wall is staring at them from her dining room table. The next day, Isaac brings over a 5000-piece of the Taj Mahal, and it becomes a part of what they do. Riding motorcycles and working on puzzles, doing lunches at the diner, they fall into a pattern that helps to keep her busy. 

Scott and Stiles come over sometimes, and even Kira comes with them on occasion, but Stiles doesn’t bring Malia. Lydia is curious, she wants to know what’s going on without having to actually ask someone and risk them thinking that she cares too much. But Malia doesn’t make another appearance, and Lydia doesn’t assume that she’s entirely out of the picture, but she still wonders what happened between them.

It’s not a burning curiosity, more like a niggling thought doesn’t leave her alone. Things have been silted between her and Stiles since the night that they – well, slept together. Not slept together, because they didn’t have sex, but really, slept together in the most innocent sense of the words. And she’s all too used to thinly veiled conversations with completely veiled meanings, disguised intentions, and innuendos. She is queen bee of Beacon Hills High School, after all, but that doesn’t mean she wants to decipher everything Stiles tells her.

“One of the pieces must have dropped on the floor,” Lydia says, staring at the Taj Mahal, complete except for a piece of sky in the upper left hand corner. It’s a brand new puzzle, so the piece has to be here somewhere – did they lose it when they moved it from her kitchen into the living room?

Getting below the table, Isaac says, “Check over by the Great Wall, make sure we didn’t leave any over there.” He scrounges around for a few more minutes before raising a hand above the table, in it a pen that she hasn’t seen for a few weeks. “I take it this wasn’t what you were – ow, shit,” he says, wincing when he hits his head on the way up.

“Careful,” she says, rolling her eyes at him while she walks to the dining room to check that the missing piece isn’t innocently hanging out with the other puzzle. It’s not, and the Great Walls looks the same as when she left it last: immense and intimidating, but mostly reminiscent of an age gone past. Someday, when her life is calmer and she has the time to do it, she’ll travel the world and see it for herself, but until then she’ll have to be satisfied by this.

When she comes back into the living room, Isaac is nowhere to be found, so she flops back onto one of the couches and scrunches her nose as she looks around, hoping to find the piece somewhere on the floor. 

“Lydia, what’re these?” Isaac asks, voice trailing down from upstairs. 

Pulling herself off of the couch, she wanders up to find him. He probably went up to find the bag that he brought it over with, which they’d thrown into her room. Still, if he’s in her room and asking what some things are, she’s hoping that he hasn’t found her small box of sex toys under her bed. Really, she’d rather not explain those.

No, it’s not the box of sex toys that he’s holding up when Lydia comes in. Instead, it’s the volumes she’s been steadily liberating from Deaton, the ones that have made a home on her night stand. The ones she’s been reading like they’re going to fix everything, like she’ll find a way to make things better.

She brushes her hair back and stares at him like he’s the one who’s being weird here, because those books are fairly self-explanatory. “I’ve been doing some research. Deaton lent me those, so I’ve been looking through them.”

When he turns to her so that she can see the entry in question, it’s one of the first that she bookmarked in hopes that it would help Stiles. Demonic possession repulsions require forces of new life in most cases, and this passage highlights how human contact can provide it. “New life? Possession?” Isaac demands, his voice shaking for some reason that she can’t bring herself to identify. “What the hell are you doing with these?”

Trying to find something, anything, even if she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Because now that Stiles is doing better, now that there aren’t any more direct threats to the pack that they need to worry about, she doesn’t know what she needs. Only she’s missing, well, she’s missing something. “I’m finding things we might need. Better to prepare for the supernatural backlash sooner rather than later, right? We should have some idea of what we’re going up against.” Her words just sound like excuses, though, and of course he picks up on it.

This time, when he looks at her, it’s not only his voice that shakes. The hand at his side shivers, and she doesn’t know what to do with the look that he’s giving her. “You can’t fucking do this, it’s going to go wrong. And you weren’t going to tell anyone, because of course not, you can handle this all by yourself. How did you think this was going to go over with the rest of us, huh? What happens if you fuck it up?” he yells, claws extended.

Lydia understands that there are times when allowing the shift helps the wolf to subside, and she can rationalize that this is one of those times for whatever reason. However, Isaac is yelling at her about God only knows what, and he’s partially shifted. The only response that makes sense to her is terror. And so she starts trembling, mind racing as she curses the fact that over-exposure to Stiles has her thinking that a baseball bat would be good right now. “What are you talking about?” she snaps, finally reaching over and picking up a mirror from her dresser.

It won’t be able stop a werewolf, but it might be heavy enough to knock some sense into Isaac. 

Seeing her get ready to defend herself, Isaac stops for a moment, claws retracting as he forces the shift back. “Lydia,” he says, only a little less infuriated, “I’m not so dumb that I can’t see what’s right in front of me. Please, tell me that you haven’t actually started anything. It wouldn’t be the same as it was with Peter, it won’t work on her.” The last part of it he says softly, as though he’s pleading with her.

“Started what? Apparently I am dumb enough to miss what’s right in front of me, so spell it out,” she demands, gingerly setting the mirror back now that Isaac seems more like himself.

Helplessly, he stares at her. He’s still holding up the book, shaking as he tries to decide if she’s being serious. Finally, with an expression akin to the one that Chris Argent wore when he looked at his daughter’s coffin, he says, “I know you’re going to try to resurrect her. Allison’s not a werewolf, though. It won’t work.”

This time, it’s her turn to start shaking. “What?” she whispers, the word coming out softly, as though the wind has been knocked out of her. If he’d actually attacked her instead, she doubts that she’d be more unsettled. She hasn’t been looking over resurrection spells, she’s been trying to figure out magic. But now, she thinks about the thrum under her skin whenever she flips through the pages, and she thinks about what she did in the name of research. 

Is this what she’d been propelling herself towards? After all this time, is this what she’s been trying to figure out – is this what will help, what will make things better? Her stomach flips, and she can’t figure out why.

“Oh,” Isaac breathes, putting the books back before stepping over to her. “I thought, I just saw the page… I’m sorry.” Wrapping his arms around her, he doesn’t seem to take it as a deterrent that she hasn’t relaxed into his touch, holding her tighter instead of letting go. “I didn’t know what else it would be for.”

Words come to mind, but they die on the tip of her tongue. Her throat is parched, and when was the last time that she had something to drink? When did her room become freezing, when did Isaac decide that she needed to be hugged, when did the pack become something like family instead of a barely functioning group of friends? When did her legs give out from underneath her, when did she start crying, when did Allison die?

One month ago. Allison died one month ago.

Her breaths come in at an off-kilter beat, haphazardly as she tries to work through it. _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three. Get it together, Martin, get a hold of yourself_. Sobs wrack through her, even as she tries to keep the tears at bay, and she clutches at Isaac’s shoulders in an attempt to remain upright.

“It’s okay, I’m right here,” Isaac tells her, trying to be as comforting as he can. He turns them so that they’re angled by the bed, and then he sits them down carefully on the edge. “It’s okay, you’re okay.”

Even with him echoing those words over and over again, Lydia can’t help but feel as though he’s wrong. It’s not okay, and she’s not okay, and it’s never going to be okay again. She won’t ever be okay again, because it’s been a month and Allison is spending her Christmas break rotting in the ground instead of at coffee shops as she reads through pretentious French books with an infuriating smirk on her face.

Allison is gone, and she isn’t coming back. Lydia feels like she’s suffocating, as though she might as well join Allison since nothing else sounds quite as good as wrapping herself in a layer of dirt and sleeping for forever. Her chest heaves with the effort of working through her cries, and Isaac doesn’t turn away from her as she shivers.

When she finally gets a handle on the situation, the sun has gone down and she can’t remember when she started crying. Her hands are still shaking, though, and Isaac is practically curled around her in an effort to keep her from catapulting off the bed. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she manages, wiping at her eyes.

“Are you sure?” he asks, lifting his weight off of her. “I’m sorry, I just assumed, I didn’t know,” he babbles, touching her shoulder gently, like he thinks she might fall apart if given the chance.

Stomach churning, she swallows and gives him what’s probably the most pathetic attempt at a smile he’s ever seen. “It’s fine, I’m fine, don’t worry.” The words come of their own accord, and for once she’s thankful that her auto-pilot state is immediately defensive, because the last thing that she wants to do is talk about this. “Really, thank you, but you shouldn’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

He stares at her flatly. “That didn’t look like fine.” Because it’s true, okay, he’s never seen someone break down like that, and he tries to keep from being around break downs. Hence why he stayed away from Allison’s funeral, in case he felt compelled to have one of his own. 

“I’m fine!” she snaps, the palms of her hands digging into her eyes, making her whole world totally dark for one blissful moment. “I’m fine, and we don’t need to talk about it.” She’d probably sound more intimidating if her voice didn’t break in the middle of the sentence, but she still keeps up appearances, lowering her hands just enough to glare at him. “You should go,” she tries, desperately hopeful that he’ll just leave.

For once, it seems like everything is going to go like she needs it to, because Isaac stands up and turns away from her. “Fine, if that’s what you really want,” he tells her, looking around for the jacket he came over with.

She remains on the bed, frozen, as he walks over to the desk chair and pulls his jacket off the back. And then, as he reaches the doorframe, he stops and asks in a pitiful voice, “Do you really want me to go?”

Biting her lip, Lydia tries to muster up the strength to tell him that she wants him as far away as possible, she never wants to see him again. Instead, she turns to face him and breaks. “Stay. Please.”

-x-

Isaac doesn’t want to leave her the next day. He’s still worried, which is understandable since she apparently cried herself out for four hours the night before, but still. She’s a big girl, and she can handle herself.

“No, listen, I’m going to be alright. If it makes you feel any better, you can stay tonight, too, but you cannot puppy guard me from myself for an entire day, okay?” Lydia asserts, arms crossed over her chest as she stands at her front door. Isaac is in front of her with narrowed eyes, clearly trying to find a way to tell her that he’s planning on staying, but she’s not having any of that.

He stayed the night before, sleeping in her desk chair that gave him the worst crick in the neck. She’d told him twice that she didn’t care if they shared the bed, it was big and she’d keep strictly to her own side, but he hadn’t considered it either time. Once citing that her mattress was too squishy, and once ignoring her altogether.

Sighing, he rolls his eyes and tries to move to where he’ll be able to wedge a foot through the door, but when she only steps forward to block him he backs off. “You’re not alright, you need to talk about this with someone.”

Her jaw is set with determination as she shakes her head, because, really, she could say the same to him. She’s not going to use low blows like that, though, because she’s more logical than that and she’s above preying on someone’s emotions even if one of them clearly isn’t. “I’m going to take the day and process how I feel about everything, and I’m going to do it alone.” Her heartbeat doesn’t even betray her, because it’s mostly true.

He stares at her like he doesn’t quite believe her anyway, and if this is a stare down, there’s no way she’s going to back off. She’s Lydia Martin, queen of Beacon Hills High School, and no one gets to assert their dominance over her. Not even some newly bitten werewolf who thinks he knows best.

After a minute, when it’s clear that she’s not going to let him win this, he drops his gaze and relaxes. “Fine, I’ll go for the day, but I’m staying tonight. You don’t need to be alone.” And he doesn’t either, if he’s forced to admit it.

Jutting her chin out a little further with pride, she nods. “Speaking of people who don’t need to be alone, see if you can give Derek a call. If a sourwolf is in a room and no one is around to hear him, does he still complain?” she ponders, grinning when the query gets a chuckle out of Isaac. She does wonder how Derek’s doing, and if it gets Isaac out of her hair, she’ll be killing two birds with one stone.

With another roll of his eyes, he waves and heads off, and Lydia ducks back into the house before her busybody neighbor can call her mother and report that she had a boy staying the night. With Isaac gone, she has the whole day to herself, which should give her just enough time to find the books that she’ll need.

-x-

Realistically, she should feel rushed. Isaac will only be gone for a few hours, she’s not dumb enough to delude herself with the thought that he’ll hold off for longer. He’s worried about her, and it’s a reasonable worry, she supposes, considering that she spent hours of yesterday sobbing next to him.

Still, for the first time since she got her hands on Deaton’s books, Lydia doesn’t feel driven by desperation, or fear, or anything, really. She’s calm, because this is right. She picks up the volume with the purposes of ingredients for spells, and she flips through it casually. Again, there’s no need to rush, not when everything suddenly makes sense.

Rustling through pages, she takes her time to write down notes – good, detailed notes with handwriting that isn’t cramped. No, she wants to be able to read this again, wants to have a drawing board to return to, and she needs to read out her thought process for that to happen. She even catalogues possible future uses, things to look into for the pack’s protection. Everything is falling into place, and it feels crystal clear because this time she actually knows what she’s looking for. Not like weeks ago when she was hunting for anything and everything.

No, no, this time she has a purpose. Nothing helps clear her head like a new idea, and this idea hasn’t just cleared her head it’s purified it. Everything feels newer, better. She isn’t even tired anymore, no, because how could she want to sleep when she’s spending her time getting closer to the answer?

Of course, research like this means that she can’t bounce ideas off of Stiles. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience all the same, because a second opinion is always helpful. Even if he does just end up playing devil’s advocate most of the time, grinning at her while he forces her to go through the proof, step by step. If she came to him with this, it’s a 50/50 chance, a coin toss as to whether he’d throw himself into the work with her or call Scott.

If Scott is called, chances are they’re likely to send her to Eichen House in Stiles’s stead. Plus, she’d have to see his soft, disappointed eyes, because he’s probably convinced himself that it can’t be done.

There’s two days until the full moon, and she’d need far more than that to convince Scott that she’s right, which means she can’t take the risk of calling Stiles. She’ll just have to be that much more careful, but that doesn’t feel like a challenge right now, not with how all of her equations are falling into place like magic.

 _Magic_ , she thinks, giggling a little. It feels like an inside joke of some sort, something that she has to keep to herself or else take the chance of losing the secret. It’s not really magic, though, it’s just math, and there’s nothing that makes more sense to her than math. It’s always been that way, ever since she first laid eyes on an algebra problem and realized that there were better things out there than solving for circumference. 

Realistically, she wonders if she’ll be able to use any of this research to get a Fields medal. It would be a few years ahead of schedule, but for something like that she doesn’t mind having to adjust the plan. With a smile on her face, she loses herself to the old books, drinking in the knowledge with a purpose in mind.

-x-

Isaac stays with her in the night, asleep in the guest bedroom across the hall, and Lydia keeps spending her nights with books by lamplight. Her plans grow, and soon enough she has something that’s so crazy it just might work. She has to buy some things, but she still has a day to do it, and tomorrow she’ll finish off with everything that she needs. And then it’ll be a waiting game until the moon is high in the sky and everyone else is far enough away that they won’t hear her.

Isaac and Scott (and Malia, she supposes) always spend the full moon together, running around in the preserve and just trying to get the itch out from under their skin. So she won’t have to worry about Isaac stopping her, which is a bit of a relief.

The silver knife with bone handle isn’t hard to find, that’s just a stop at an antique store where she pretends she’s buying a gift for her mother. She even stays long enough to chat with the shopkeeper, a middle aged woman who smells of furniture polish and is graying around the temples. The marble mortar and pestle comes from a sketchy place that claims to be an apothecary and is probably only a front for drugs, but Lydia knows her materials and the marble in the pieces is as real as the custom installed countertops her mother got for the kitchen last year.

Her mother’s always kept a small herb garden, so that’s where most of those ingredients come from. The rest, less commonplace and harder to grow, she buys from a local organic produce market, using the excuse that she’s making dinner for her boyfriend who’s a vegan. The cashier laughs, admits she’s a vegetarian who cheats on the diet more often than not, and sends Lydia on her merry way.

For the first time since Allison died, Lydia doesn’t feel frazzled, or stressed, or worn thin. She’s nervous, but not overly so, and it’s more excitement that’s translated into nervousness rather the angst. Truthfully, it’d be easier to do if Isaac wasn’t staying, but she knows that it helps him, and it’s barely an inconvenience. Really, the only worrisome thing is that he’ll sniff out the herbs, but she already has a lie prepared when he comes over to say that he’ll be back the next morning.

Sure enough, he doesn’t notice it, just stands and looks at her like he’s really not sure if she’s going to fall to piece right in front of him. And, granted, it’s a reasonable worry, but right now she doesn’t feel that it’s warranted. If anything, she’s more worried about him. Isaac has, after all, not shown many signs of emotional distress. Just withdrawal and general quietness, none of the usual bite behind his words now, and she’d start looking into it but she already is, in a roundabout way. What she’s doing will help him. It’ll help all of them.

Stiles calls her while she’s in the middle of going through the list one more time, and he says he’s checking in to make sure she’s not lonely. After all, he mentions, he and Scott haven’t seen her around recently. And it’s not good for any of them to be alone. Not now.

It’s only with a small amount of guilt that she realizes she has kind of been ignoring him and Scott. It’s for the best, though, just like it’s for the best that she doesn’t press Isaac to talk about everything. What she’s doing is going to help, and by next week they’ll be back to normal. Or next month, maybe, because time isn’t a variable in any of her equations so she doesn’t have a realistic guess as to how long everything will take.

Besides, it’s not like she has any previous data points to compare it to.

“I’m fine, Stiles. Just… I’ve been sorting through some things.” It’s vague enough that he’ll probably leave it alone, understand she doesn’t want to be questioned about it, and it has the added bonus of being true. Which is nice, because she really doesn’t like lying to people.

Actually, she doesn’t mind lying to people. Lying to Scott and Stiles is a different story, though, after they’ve been through so much together and come out connected. She’s tied to them, but she’s not going to have them worry unnecessarily about her. Even worse, she’s not going to let them try to stop her.

He sighs, and something tells her that it’s an answer he’d been expecting but hoping against. “Yeah. Scott and I were in his room yesterday, and he found a photo of Allison in one of his drawers. God, I would give anything…” Drifting off, he sighs again. “We all would.”

It’s true. Beyond true, and the evidence is right in front of her. If there’s ever going to be a time to tell him, it’s now. The opportunity is right in front of her, and yet she finds herself keeping quiet all the same. Tomorrow, the sun will rise, and things will start to get better. Allison’s going to make everything better, because otherwise they all need to prepare themselves for the worst years of their lives.

“I’m just worried about you, Lydia,” Stiles starts again, and that’s not right, she should be the one worried about, he doesn’t need to bother with how she’s been doing. “If you get lonely, I’m always here for you.”

There is it, the blanket statement that she knew was coming and still isn’t quite sure what to do with. “I’m always here for you, too,” she returns. “And I’m not lonely, I’d call if I was. Or I’d come over and spend time with you and Scott. Really, though, I’ve just been… Working on some stuff. And Isaac’s here most nights, so we’ve been trying to get through it together.” Well, they’ve been trying to get through it separately. Just near each other.

Stiles freezes, clamming up for no reason whatsoever, and then he bites out, “Yeah, well, I kind of figured. Glad you guys found each other. Allison would be thrilled,” he says, and the words come out with too much bite to be anything but insincere, but she doesn’t know why.

A moment passes, and then two, and Lydia wants to fix this, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong. She feels tired, and while that’s been a constant emotion for the past month, it’s the first time that true exhaustion has taken over. Even the thought of trying to continue the conversation makes her very bones ache, and so she ends the phone call. “I’m just tired, Stiles,” she says, and the words come out heavy and syrup slow.

“Been up all night, I’m sure,” he returns, hanging up.

Her head pounds, and her desk is digging into her hip from this position, so she sets an alarm for eleven and crawls into bed. She’s going to wake up and make everything better, because that’s who she is. She’s Lydia Martin, and she’s going to fix this if it’s the last time that she does.

It might just be the last thing she does, given that the equations she’s found are only for the results of the spell on the object it was cast on, not for the caster. Still, she can’t not do anything, not when disaster will imminently head their way, she has to do something to ward it off for as long as she can.

-x-

Lydia dreams of a ballroom, and she’s dancing with men that she doesn’t know, being passed from partner to partner before each movement has finished. And then she’s spinning in Jackson’s arms, his eyes not quite meeting hers before she’s being handed off again, this time to Isaac, then to Scott, who gives her to Stiles with a mournful glance that doesn’t make sense. The music speeds up, and Stiles doesn’t say anything before he spins her out.

She lands into something solid, and when she looks up its Peter Hale’s eyes that greet her, a fanged smile making its way onto his face as he snarls, “So nice of you to join us, Lydia.”

Her alarm goes off, and she jolts awake, gasping as she clutches her side in phantom memory of the pain. It only takes a moment to adjust, to remember she’s just been dreaming. There’s no time to waste thinking about how the dream would have continued, because she has other plans for the night.

She gathers everything into a bag, and she even checks to make sure that Isaac’s gone before she moves to head out. The first hitch in the plan, though, happens when she gets to the kitchen and can’t find her car keys. And she left the spare set at her father’s the last time she’d been there, so she really needs to get that back, but mostly she just really needs a way to leave the house without asking anyone for a ride.

Because Stiles is pissed at her because God knows why, so of course he’d call Scott once he figured out what she’s doing, and he’d figure it out because that’s the kind of person he is. And he’d call Scott, who would predictably panic, and he would probably do something stupid like call her mother. And her mother would cry.

Okay, so, once again, relying on anyone else to take her a no-go. Even Isaac, especially Isaac, wouldn’t let her leave if she told him why. And it’s not like she could convince him that she wanted to hang out at the cemetery for shits and giggles, not when it’s nearing midnight. Although thinking of Isaac gives her an idea, and after a little shuffling of papers on the kitchen counters, she uncovers the keys to Isaac’s motorcycle, which are here because he was feeling restless and decided to run to Scott’s.

She’s experienced enough at driving the motorcycle now to not worry about crashing. Granted, she hasn’t ridden much on her own, but it’s not like Isaac exactly has control when she’s the one driving. Her hands are shaking a little as she gathers the keys, ties back her hair, and locks the door behind her.

With any luck, she’ll be back in two hours, and Isaac will come back to never even know that she left.

The hiccup has kind of shifted everything, though, because it’s almost eleven thirty when she leaves, and she’s not exactly steady behind the handlebars. Her hands keep shaking, nerves finally appearing just when she thought she was in clear, and her bones feel heavy and frozen, like’s she’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

It’s ridiculous, because she’s making the right call. She did the math, backed up the proofs again and again, double checked the properties of all the ingredients, and she’s worked it through so many times that she recites the equations as she drives. The wind through her hair calms her, and by the time she’s across town and standing at the graveyard gates, she’s reassured once more.

There are still nerves, of course, but she’s not going to let something like that stop her.

The trick is going to be finding Allison’s grave. Because the last time she was here for the burial, Kira drove because Lydia and Stiles were still not seeing straight after the funeral. So she’s not as familiar with the layout and she needs to be, because she only has twenty minutes.

Thankful that she at least remembered to bring a flashlight, Lydia turns it on and stalks through the area that feels right. It’s near the edge, under a great canopy from the trees above, and it’s there that she finds the headstone that hadn’t been in place the last time she’d been here. Allison Argent reads simple and elegant, and only a little bile rises in her throat at that, because it won’t be here for much longer. Allison won’t be here for much longer.

The instructions come out of the bag first, because while she remembers the equations she’s not going to risk fucking the procedure up. Not when she’s pretty sure this is a one shot only thing. Then the beeswax candles made with lemon rind for friendship and healing. She doesn’t light the candles, just positions them on the headstone and sets her box of matches next to the middle one.

The mortar and pestle come out next, followed by the silver knife, and she puts those on the ground so that she can sift through the small packages of herbs that she’ll need. Dried elder flowers are commonly used in exorcisms, and while that’s not technically what this is, Lydia doesn’t know enough about death to say for sure that it isn’t some kind of demon, so she packed those just in case. Dried chrysanthemum flowers for feminine protection, jasmine for connection to the spirit realm, lavender for healing and happiness, and mugwort for ‘astral projection’, which sounds like a load of bull, but Lydia trusts her math and it’s the variable she needs.

When everything is set aside, she checks the time. 11:55, just enough time for the final process to be completed by midnight. And she doesn’t know that it necessarily has to be completed at midnight, but Lydia’s seen too many movies to not put a little stock into theatrical production. And when she tells Allison about it they’ll have something to laugh about, the idea of Lydia doing all of this under the light of a full moon for the shock value.

There aren’t any words, just procedure, and Lydia doesn’t need to waste any more time.

The first thing is that the candles are lit, starting with the centermost one and using it to light the other four. Her hands, previously shaking, have steadied enough to where she doesn’t even spill a drop of wax, even when she sets it back down. The mugwort goes into the mortar first, and she crushes it down, ignoring the weird scent that rises. One drop of wax from the first candle, and then the jasmine goes in. She repeats the procedure, only changing it by adding two drops from the second candle. Then the elder flowers with three drops from the third candle. Four drops from the fourth candle come after the chrysanthemum, and the last herb is lavender.

The fifth candle sits untouched, though, and Lydia works the mixture well, until it’s foul smelling and has a texture that’s closer to oatmeal than the thick and clumpy liquid that she’d been expecting. When there’s nothing more for her do it with it, she extinguishes the first four candles with her fingertips and runs the burn over her forearm to sooth it.

 _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three_. She repeats the mantra in her head as she picks up the knife. It’s heavier than she remembers, though she’d only been holding it a minute ago. Maybe now it’s heavy with intent, and the thought almost startles a laugh out of her.

Once Allison is back, Lydia can rest safe in the knowledge that her best friend is alive and well, but until that happens she’s never going to rest easy. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for her to run her thumb over the edge, giving barely a wince at how cold it is to the touch.

There’s a word on the tip of her tongue as she lifts the edge of her shirt and traces where she’s sure Allison was stabbed. It would be so easy, so easy, to forget that she only needs a little bit of pressure. To just press the knife into her stomach and die with Allison’s fatal wound on her body, but her hands are shaking too badly for it to be a clean cut, and she’s never been good with blood in the first place.

The word sticks in the back of her throat as she bites back at the tears that prick her eyes, stinging in the cold night air. Pushing the side of her jeans down until the smooth expanse of skin on her hip is staring back up at her, and she’s come too far to give up now when she’s so close.

Pressing the knife into her flesh, her eyes fling open and she gasps in surprise. The stinging kiss of the silver is only a distant memory as she drops the knife to the ground and pulls the mortar towards her. The word edges ever closer, and as she squeezes the first drop of penance it comes to mind. _Redemption._ The four other drops come easily, fat and heavy as they leave a ruby trail down her skin, and she waits until the fifth one is secure on the edge of the bowl before grabbing the pestle.

The wind starts up, although whether that’s by natures doing or her own, she doesn’t know. It blows hard enough that the fifth and final candle extinguishes, and Lydia is left in the dark as she mixes her own blood into what’s quickly become her last hope. “God damn it, Allison,” she breathes out, feeling as though she’s been sucker punched.

There’s blood under her fingernails, and she doesn’t remember using the knife that liberally, but there’s blood seeping through her jeans, and the moon glows bright and luminescent. Lydia's doing this for Allison, though, and that alone means it's worth it. The wind blows harder, knocking one of the candles over, and it falls onto her, spilling hot wax down her side all the while. 

Surprised, Lydia jumps back, tripping over her bag and landing on the ground. It’s by some sort of miracle that she doesn’t spill the mixture, and she doesn’t even care, just dumps it onto the ground and presses it down with her hands, unmindful of the fact that it’s still hot from the wax.

She pulls up clumps of earth in and the process and by the time she’s done, dirt up her arms and bleeding from the hip, she has a moment of absolute clarity.

It’s not going to work.

Everything dims in her mind before coming back in full force. The pain from cut and where the spilled wax hit her side, the aching of her bones, the frigid temperature, it all hits her with a vengeance that leaves her breathing heavy and her hands shaking. Allison’s gone, Allison’s dead, and she’s not coming back. The tears she’d been holding back begin to leak out, and once it’s started it’s like the release of a waterfall.

She came here on a mission, and she’s left with blood on her hands and tears on her cheeks. Every breath hurts, because she’s realizing that she’s been banking on this working the whole time, and it’s not. Nothing’s going to work, and they’re all going to be fucked up for the rest of their lives because Allison fell down and wasn’t able to get back up again.

Her ankle throbs, too, and Lydia identifies the pain and tests it quickly, sure enough finding that she can’t put weight on it. She must have sprained it, or twisted it, when she’d fallen, too preoccupied with doing an impossible spell to give a shit about her own welfare. The bike is fifty yards away, and even if she could manage to get there she wouldn’t be able to drive back. Not with how much pain is coming when she’s only lying down.

With shaking fingers, she pulls her phone from the bag and finds her list of most recent calls. He’s the only one who won’t judge her, so she calls him and can’t help herself but to breathe out, “Stiles,” when he picks up.

-x-

By the time Stiles’s Jeep pulls into the cemetery, the blood on her hands and the wax on her side has dried. Her hip is still bleeding sluggishly, red blood cells rushing over to the area, and she’s managed to put the candles away, along with the pestle and mortar. The knife fell too far for her to reach it and it sits a few yards away, glinting a reddish tint under the moonlight.

“Lydia!” he shouts, climbing out of the cab and shining a flashlight around as he looks for her.

She goes to say his name, but when she tries to prop up her torso she moves her ankle in the process and what ends up coming out of her mouth is a strangled, half-cry of pain.

He makes it over to her quickly enough, and when she finally makes out his face above the beam, it’s all she can do to not start sobbing yet again. Just presses her hand harder into her hip, desperate to stop the bleeding, and blinks at him through the nausea and nagging feeling that she’s gotten grit into the cut.

“Lydia,” Stiles breathes in relief, voice cracking between the syllables. He kneels next to her and tangles the hand that’s not holding his flashlight the hand of hers that isn’t clutching her hip. It only takes him a moment to look around and process everything before he’s running his thumb soothingly over the back of her hands and whispering, “You tried to resurrect her.” He sounds shell-shocked and winded, but his hand is steady in hers and that’s all Lydia can bring herself to care about at the moment.

Twisting to better face him, she lets out a low hiss and tries to wipe tears from her face, but the dirt in her hands only sticks to her wet skin and she’s only made more a mess of herself. She’s only made more of a mess of everything, and now she’s asking him to help her pick up the pieces.

It occurs to her that Stiles is waiting on her to say something, but every answer seems forced, and he already knows what happened, so she stays silent and lets him attempt to comfort her.

He’s looking at her ankle now, holding the flashlight over it and trying to figure out how bad it looks. “I’m going to drive the Jeep up here as close as I can, and then I’m going to carry you to it, okay? You won’t have to walk.” He waits for her to nod before letting go of her hand, squeezing it gently as he does so. 

With that, he makes back for the Jeep, and Lydia looks up at the stars through the canopy of trees, trying to hold back renewed tears for a reason she can’t identify. By the time he’s made it back, she’s found the North Star.

“Hold your breath, this might hurt a little,” he whispers, getting one arm under her knees and the other around her waist. It’s a bit of a struggle, and he nudges her ankle in the process, but finally he’s got her in the air and is repeating, “I’m sorry,” into her skin, over and over, like it might help.

Clutching at him, she wraps her arms around for a grip that’s better for both of them and tries to keep from whimpering from the pain. She can’t figure out why he’s apologizing, because she thought it was pretty sure that was supposed to be her job in this situation, but she can’t bring herself to say that she’s the one who fucked up. Not when he might actually agree.

Getting her into the Jeep is another struggle, and Lydia finally buckles her seatbelt as Stiles trots back to get her bag, which they’d left in the dirt.

She looks over, blinking through the tears, and watches as he pauses in front of the headstone before making his way back to her, and it’s because of the silver glint that she realizes why. He found the knife she’d dropped that had landed too far away for her to grab without moving her ankle. Her head feels heavy, like she’s hit it on something, and Stiles doesn’t say anything when he gets in and starts the car, putting her bag between them.

The lights of Beacon Hills pass by them, and Stiles doesn’t even pay attention to red lights as he drives. There’s no other cars on the road at this time of night, and she guesses that the Sheriff’s had to get him out traffic violations before, but this just seems excessive. At least, that’s what she thinks until she looks down and sees the bloodstain that’s growing on her hip.

“I’ve got you,” he says, noticing how Lydia’s trying to press down hard on the cut. Reaching into the back seat, his hands turns up with a jacket that he passes to her without hesitation. “Tie that around it, we can take care of it when we get to your house.”

Once again, she’s so thankful that Isaac isn’t at the house. “I drove Isaac’s bike to the cemetery,” she says, hissing the words out as she follows his instructions and presses the fabric against the wound. “Someone needs to drive it back.” Because it’s one thing to explain a cut on her hip and the smell of blood, it’s another to explain how Isaac’s bike magically drove itself to the cemetery and didn’t come back.

Stiles nods gravely, and he’s in the mode that she’s rarely seen him in before. It’s like he can’t even be bothered to have feelings about anything, because he doesn’t get pissed off about her mentioning of Isaac like he usually would, he’s too concerned with how he’s going to fix this. “I’ll call Scott, he’ll get it back to your house. It was at your house right?” He waits for her to nod shakily, continuing, “I’ll tell him enough to where he won’t ask questions, and Isaac won’t think it’s weird that his bike smells like Scott since they’ve been hanging out recently.”

He keeps talking, detailing how everything is going to work out, and if Lydia were in a more lucid state of mind she’d probably be more appreciative. As it is, though, she only processes half of it, just keeps nodding and looking out the window to judge how far from her house they are because, even with the ignored red lights, this drive feels like it’s taking forever.

“It doesn’t look like you’ll need stitches, but we’ll definitely need to do first aid. Why do you keep wincing when you shift against the door?” he demands, pulling her from her thoughts and into her driveway.

The side the wax spilled on is against the door, and every time he takes a curve she jostles the fabric against that area. “I spilled some of candle wax on myself,” Lydia confesses, resisting the temptation to pull up her shirt to see how bad it is. She reaches for the bag, only to find that Stiles already has it and is marching in front of the car, opening her door and trying to get as good of a grip on her as he can.

“You should have said something earlier,” he reprimands, no heat in his voice as he carries her up to the front door and opens it with the keys he’d pulled from her bag in preparation. “I’m going to take you up to your room, okay, so just hold onto the wall. I’m probably going to hit your ankle, and I’m really sorry about it.”

He does hit her ankle several times on the trip, but when Lydia crashes into her bed it’s all worth it. “First aid kit is in the bathroom, under the sink,” she says, coherent enough to point him in the right direction as she pulls up her shirt to inspection the burned area. It doesn’t look like she’ll scar, but those marks will be with her for a while, especially from where a few of the blisters have already broken open.

“Stop fucking messing with it, let me,” Stiles snaps, yanking her hands away as he sets the kit on the bed and opening it. It’s apparently to his satisfaction, because soon he’s pulling out an antiseptic and telling her to hold her breath before dousing a cotton swab in the liquid and running it over her skin. The sting is soothed immediately after, some kind of salve or ointment she needs to praise her mother for buying, and soon enough he’s laying gauze over the area and putting tape over it. 

Moving her shirt back, she twists and shoves her jeans down a little, cursing the fact that she was stupid enough to where anything high-waisted. It requires her unbuttoning the top two buttons to get a good look at the mark, and Stiles sucks in a breath when he gets a good look at the cut before calming himself and grabbing the antiseptic again. He doesn’t even wait for her to bite down or hold her breath, just grabs the cotton ball and swipes it over her skin, and even though he’s putting the barest of pressure on her it stings like a bitch.

She can’t help but give a shout, because fuck does it hurt. “Jesus, is that liquid fire?”

He keeps rubbing at the wound, glaring at her all the while. “You don’t get to be pissed at me when you were stupid enough to try to raise the dead, especially when you cut yourself in the process,” he practically growls, ignoring how her eyes roll back when he starts in with a new cotton ball.

Pressing one of her hands into the mattress and the other into her eyes, Lydia bites her lip and keeps her noises down to a minimum, because he’s right and it hurts. Even when he bandages up her hip and moves up to her ankle, wrapping gauze around it tightly while mumbling something about compression, she keeps quiet and avoids looking over to him. 

After a few more minutes, she’s lying in bed with her side and hip bandaged, her ankle wrapped tightly and propped up on a pillow as Stiles leaves to go get an ice pack. Still covering her eyes, she cracks her fingers to see through when she hears him coming up the stairs, talking to someone.

“Scott’s taking care of the bike. Are you hurt anywhere else, did you hit your head?” he asks, shoving his phone away and laying the plastic bag filled with ice over her ankle before setting a glass of water on her nightstand. Before she can answer, he’s moved up to her head and is running his hands over it, perfunctorily and impersonally.

“I didn’t hit my head,” Lydia says, moving her hand to grab a pillow and put it under her head. She’s so tired.

He ignores her, continuing his inspection until he’s satisfied. “Please, Lydia,” he finally breathes, turning back to the first aid kit and opening a small bottle of pills. “These are painkillers,” he starts, but she’s grabbed two before he can finish, lifting her torso just enough to where she can chase the pills with water. “And you shouldn’t take more than one at a time, but instructions are for rookies, evidently, so just be careful.” He looks over her carefully, sinking onto the bed next to her as he looks over her injuries once more, whispering “Jesus, Lydia,” so softly that she can’t be sure if he said it or not.

That’s all there really is to say, and she knows it, so she keeps quiet and finds his hand with her own, twining them together. She’s so tired, and the last time she was able to have a dreamless sleep was when he slept next to her. There’s nothing she wants more than to avoid seeing Allison tonight in her dreams, and she doesn’t think she can be blamed for that when her best friend is in the ground because of her.

Stiles hesitates for a moment. “Lydia, Isaac’s going to smell that I was here,” he says finally. It’s something that’s he’s been thinking of, but until now being in Lydia’s room wasn’t an option. Not when she was hurt and bleeding and he needed to take care of her, but now she could manage on her own. 

Blinking, she turns her face to him and says, “Why would he?” It comes out a little slurred, but she doesn’t really think that it’s a thought that deserves too much of her attention.

“Because he’s going to be in here.” And he didn’t want to have to say it, but she has to know that.

“He sleeps in the guest bedroom,” she says stupidly before recognition flutters on her face. “We haven’t slept together. I just sleep better when I’m not alone in the house.” Because the dreams are always bad, but they’re better when her subconscious knows that it’s not just her and the nightmares.

He pauses, squinting, and then just says, “Oh.” As though it’s that simple. Still, the clock on Lydia’s nightstand is showing that it’s half past two in the morning, and he’s too tired to argue. The warmth of her hand on his, keeping him anchored next to her, pulls him back in. Lying on his back, he barely even minds that the lights are still on, just closes his eyes and gets lost in a dreamless sleep.

-x-

In the morning, her head aches and the pain when she jostles her hip is so sharp that she’s sucking in air through clenched teeth. Stiles gives her another painkiller after checking the time, calling Scott to give him a half-assed excuse as to why he had to drive Isaac’s bike to Lydia’s house without letting Isaac know. It’s not even an explanation, just an understanding between the two of them that they sometimes can’t tell each other everything, and this is one of the many times that Stiles is thankful to have Scott for a best friend.

Lydia sleeps fitfully, if dreamlessly, and whenever she wakes Stiles is only across the room at her desk, quick to lay a hand over her head and tell her that she’s fine. He’s been going through Deaton’s books and her accompanying notes, trying to follow her equations one a spare sheet of paper where he works out the proofs.

Six sheets and paper and an hour later, he’s working on the final proof, trying to get it to turn into the neat answer Lydia has that only takes up one line. He’s never been good at simplifying things, but he tries his best, making substitutions through the other equations to come up with secondary variables that look nicer than the jumbled conjugates that he has taking over the paper. One of the big problems is that Lydia hasn’t explicitly named her variables, so he doesn’t even know what it means that he’s trying to solve for _m_.

Parts of the math require deferential equations, which he only has a limited knowledge of, but he makes it work, uses matrices and solves for Eigen values and vectors that he doesn’t understand the meaning of, but it works. And when Lydia really wakes up, blinking at him from her bed, he hasn’t been able to find a problem in her work.

No contradictions, no missing variables, no unknowns that can’t be solved for. Everything comes together, and while he’s not sure what the answer he got means, it’s the one at the bottom of Lydia’s paper, circled twice in what must have been triumph.

“Did you sleep?” Lydia asks, shifting carefully so that she can lay on her uninjured side. 

He turns and spares her a smile, because that might be the stupidest question she could have asked. “Couldn’t. I wanted to go through and work it for myself,” he says, and his words aren’t needed because she’s already looking at the pages in front of him with a gaze that’s calculating and unsure. “If it helps, I got the same answer.”

Sighing, she wipes the sleep from her eyes and looks at the ceiling. “I don’t know what happened.” And she wants to explain, because if she made him come carry her into his car from the cemetery at midnight he deserves at least that much, but the words catch in her throat and it’s too much of a block to move past. Besides, it’s true. She doesn’t know what happened, and she’s not really sure that she wants to, all things considering.

It’s also a little bit of a lie, because she knows enough of what happened to know that she shouldn’t have done any of it. She tried magic, that’s what happened; she tried to bring back her best friend and got too caught up in her grief to think anything through. She took a knife to her hip and bled into the night air.

Turning away from the proofs, Stiles approaches her and moves a lock of hair from her face. “Are you going to be?” he asks, and he’s not asking in the way that everyone’s been asking them recently, curious glances that can’t stay in one place for too long as they take in all the signs of a broken teenager. No, he means it from his bones, he means it in the way of a boy who’s seen too much and knows too little, because she has to be okay.

The usual words are on the tip of her tongue, _I’m fine_ , hair flip and spin on her high heels before marching down the hallway. But she’s not in Beacon Hills High School right now, she’s not crushing some underling who dared to question her authority, and with her twisted ankle she’d sooner fall than make a successful exit. Allowing herself to be honest for once, Lydia meets his eyes and says, “I think I’m going to get there.”

-x-

Time passes, and the burns on Lydia’s side are replaced with fresh, pink skin that’s too smooth to the touch. The cut on her hip seals over, no stitches needed just like Stiles has predicted, and the scar is long and jagged and too much like the claw marks that Peter left on her body just a year ago. She goes from using crutches throughout the day to only when she gets tired, and by the time that her mother comes home at the end of break she’s only taking them out when the pain hits her too suddenly.

Scott drives her to school the first day back, and if Natalie’s eyes follow her too quietly as Lydia slips out the door and into his passenger seat no one needs to know. She gives him a prep talk to submit his AP biology form, and she sits next to Stiles in economics and ignores the fact that Malia’s a new student, and when Isaac pauses before sitting beside them at lunch they don’t say anything. Just motion for him to pick a seat as Kira comes up and loops her arm through Scott’s with a smile that threatens to burn the lunchroom lights out.

They’re trying too hard and everyone knows it, and Lydia fidgets when she see the empty seat that Allison used to occupy. Her breathing tactic doesn’t work as well as it used to, and _Inhale, hold, one, two, three, exhale, hold, one, two, three_ becomes something that’s more for comfort than assurance. They make too many plans on the weekend, trying to make sure that no one is alone, and she’s busy beyond belief even in her free time.

“Want to go for a drive?” Isaac asks, leaning against his bike after school one day, and Lydia has an all too vivid memory of racing down empty streets at midnight, wind in her hair and heart in her throat. It’ll be the first time since then that she’ll be on the bike, but Isaac is looking at her like he needs the company and doesn’t know how else to ask.

Checking her phone to give herself some time, she finally looks up and shrugs. “You drive, but sure.” Because normalcy is something she should readjust to, and Isaac doesn’t know why she hasn’t been herself.

Stiles had kept his word, hadn’t told anyone, just said that Lydia went for a run and fell, cutting herself on a branch and twist her ankle in the process. He tells all the wolves over the phone so that they don’t hear his heartbeat, and he says it so calmly that even Lydia, still lying in bed that first morning after, had been tempted to believe him.

Isaac cracks a smile, spins his keys through his hands, and passes her a helmet. In the cold January air, Lydia pulls her sweater closer and tries for a smile that small but honest.

Time passes, and they’re getting better. They’re at least trying to, and that’s half the battle. Some days, Lydia says she’s doing well and it doesn’t even feel like a lie. Others, she goes home and sleeps for an eternity, but the good days are beginning to outnumber the bad, and they all have to start somewhere. Time passes, and she breathes a little easier. Time passes, and Allison stays buried.


End file.
